Tom Brady Weighs In on Bill Belichick Possibly Coaching in College Football

New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick announces he is leaving the team during a press conference at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on Jan. 11, 2024. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

The 2024 NFL season marks the first time in 50 years that Bill Belichick is not on a National Football League sideline, and many predicted that he’d be chomping at the bit to get back into coaching next year. What they didn’t predict, however, is that the man with eight Super Bowl titles on his resumé would consider coaching at a college instead of the NFL.

That certainly is the case as Belichick has interviewed for the head coach opening at the University of North Carolina, which is not bringing back Mack Brown next season.

Belichick has never coached at the college level, and many of those whom he coached in the pros simply can’t fathom him applying his craft to a bunch of 18-to-22-year-olds. Chief among them is arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history, Tom Brady, who appeared on “FOX NFL Sunday“ alongside former teammates Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski, and was asked if he could imagine Belichick coaching in college.

“No,” Brady bluntly responded. “I think there a lot of things he can do, and obviously he’s tremendous. ... But getting out there on the recruiting trail and dealing with all of these college kids, that would be surprising.”

Edelman and Gronkowski both agreed with Brady, with the former following up by asking if they could imagine the 72-year-old Belichick sitting on the couch during a recruiting visit and trying to sway an 18-year-old to come play for him.

Brady then launched into a Belichick impression.

“Listen, you really wanna come here,” asked Brady in his best mimic of his former coach. “I mean, we don’t really want you anyway. But, I mean, I guess you could come. We’ll figure out if you play.”

Brady mentioned Belichick showing off more of his personality this year, and the coach has been able to do that with the litany of media appearances he has. He’s part of the ManningCast on ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” is part of the CW Network’s “Inside the NFL” cast, hosts a weekly show on Underdog Fantasy and has a weekly appearance on the “Pat McAfee Show.”

Belichick’s personality would seemingly carry much more weight in the college football landscape, where players pick their program, than it did in the NFL, where teams select players through the draft or free agency. College players have all of the leverage, so Belichick would have to be much more convincing and persuasive to attract top high school players, or those in the transfer portal, while those traits aren’t needed as an NFL coach.

It was on Belichick’s Monday appearance on the “Pat McAfee Show” that he somewhat addressed the news of his interviewing for the North Carolina job. While he didn’t want to touch on specifics, he did discuss the dynamics of being a college head coach as opposed to an NFL one, and how the changing nature of college football makes the two much more similar.

“I think there are a lot of college football programs that are being structured similar to NFL programs,” stated Belichick. “In college, you now have high school recruiting but now college portal. In pro football, you have the draft and pro free agency.

“If I was in a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL. It would be a professional program: training, nutrition, scheme, coaching techniques that would transfer to the NFL. It would be an NFL program at a college level.”

So it sounds like Belichick would run a college program no differently than how he ran an NFL organization during his 29 years as a head coach and 28 years as the de facto GM. While Brady, Edelman, and Gronkowski focused on the recruiting aspect of the job, they’re also many years removed from playing college ball and may not understand the dwindling role of recruiting for a head coach in this era of college football.

Deion Sanders infamously has never made an in-home recruiting visit while at Colorado, and he’s built a successful program. So Belichick wouldn’t need to walk into a top prospect’s home and schmooze with his parents to get him to come to his school.

As for why Belichick has chosen a basketball school like UNC as his next potential destination, he does have a few ties to the Tar Heels. One is that his father, Steve, was an assistant coach at UNC in the 1950s, when Bill Belichick was a toddler. Another is that one of Belichick’s former players—a man that the coach has called the greatest defensive player in NFL history—starred at North Carolina. That is Lawrence Taylor, whom the coach is very fond of, with even Brady joking that Taylor “was the only player that Coach Belichick liked.”