The Belichick Experiment Had to Happen

After blowing a 14-point lead at Clemson to throw away what would have been Bill Belichick’s signature win at North Carolina, the 74-year-old coach talked tersely about the collapse at his postgame press conference. But he also had to fend off questions about the university investigation that led to the resignations of general manager Mike Lombardi and Belichick’s son Steve, the team’s defensive coordinator. 

“I’m just focused on the Clemson game,” Belichick told reporters with his trademark curtness. “It just ended 10 minutes ago.”

With a difficult schedule ahead—nationally ranked No. 3 Notre Dame this weekend, followed by road games at Pittsburgh and Duke with No. 4 Miami and Louisville still to come—the Belichick era of football at UNC may be grinding to an end now, last season’s 4-8 debacle on the field now supplemented by increasing turmoil away from it. The departures of Belichick’s best friend and son amid UNC’s investigation have kept the team in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. 

It may be only a matter of time (and money) before North Carolina moves in a different direction, but the issue with the Belichick experiment was one of execution, not intention. North Carolina’s multimillion dollar investment in Belichick was really an investment in the future of UNC athletics, and that will continue even if Belichick is one day only a punch line on Franklin Street.

If North Carolina wants to remain among the elite in college athletics after the next spasm of conference realignment, whatever that looks like, it must have at least some claim to football credibility. As Indiana showed last fall—a basketball-focused school like UNC winning a national title in football—the right coach and the right budget can move mountains in an industry where football accounts for at least 80% of revenue.

As existing college TV deals start to expire in 2030, a mad scramble could begin for a few seats in the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference in a billion-dollar game of musical chairs. Those changes could upend a century of Triangle rivalries, separating North Carolina and Duke and NC State, all charter members of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

No one knows what the next set of changes in college sports will look like, with shifting television rights economics, the NCAA fighting off lawsuits, the potential expansion of the College Football Playoff, and greater scrutiny from Congress. The environment is so unsettled, anything or nothing could happen. 

“It’s something that we think about on a daily basis,” North Carolina athletics director Steve Newmark told The Assembly. “I’m obviously biased, but I do feel like we are extremely well-positioned to deal with however the landscape is shaped in the next 12 to 18 months.”

UNC’s decision to pursue Belichick was driven by that future. A football failure in the micro may yet be a success in the macro.

The Power of Football and TV

If athletics seems to have lost touch with the academy, it’s partly because the revenues from football and men’s basketball must support not only those two sports but UNC’s broad-based program of 28 sports. The NCAA’s defense of amateurism, which eventually crashed and burned at the U.S. Supreme Court, opened the door to this new age of professionalism, where players can sign endorsement deals and are now paid directly by their schools.

“These schools should just acknowledge what they’re doing,” said Duke University professor emeritus Charles Clotfelter, an economist who wrote a book on the commercial aspects of big-time college sports. “Why not be more honest about it? We have these couple sports that are moneymakers.”

The evolution of the ACC from an eight-team league in five contiguous southeastern states to an unwieldy 18-team conglomerate stretching from Atlantic to Pacific is, in many ways, the story of modern college athletics: how the power of football and the influx of television money trumped history and tradition.

The Big Ten launched the Big Ten Network in conjunction with Fox in 2007, and the SEC responded with the SEC Network in partnership with ESPN in 2014. The conference networks, profiting from subscriber fees in pay-TV bundles, left the ACC financially outgunned even as it doubled its payments, called “rights fees,” from ESPN in 2010. That hit home in 2012, when Maryland decided to jump to the Big Ten. 

“It evolved,” said former NC State athletic director Debbie Yow. “Everybody was watching everybody else and asking, ‘What are they doing?’ No one wanted to fall behind.” 

The ACC’s own network finally launched in 2019, right about the time the economics of the pay-TV bundle started to collapse. As consumers moved away from expensive cable and satellite subscriptions, replacing them with online providers like YouTube TV or dropping them entirely, subscriber fees plummeted. 

Live sports, and college football in particular, remain some of the very few products that still deliver the kind of ratings advertisers desired, but the market is no longer what it once was.

“The problem is the engine that’s paid for all the current rights fees is the pay-TV bundle,” said Patrick Crakes, a sports television consultant and former Fox executive. “The only reason to realign was that it better optimized the rights fees for pay TV. And now pay TV has lost even more homes. Half of U.S. television homes do not have a pay-TV bundle. The bundle can’t pay for everything anymore.”

Fox and ESPN

There are essentially only two media bidders for college football: Fox and ESPN. While both hold the rights to several conferences, Fox is heavily invested in the success of the Big Ten while ESPN is likewise invested in the SEC. 

The Big Ten’s deal, which paid out about $76 million per school last year, expires in 2030. The SEC’s, which paid out about $70.3 million per school, expires in 2034. And the ACC’s deal with ESPN, which paid about $42.8 million per school, expires in 2036.

Conventional wisdom, based on past practice, is that Fox and ESPN will want the Big Ten and SEC to add new teams and new inventory to justify higher rights fees in their next contracts. That’s basically what’s happened over and over again during the past 25 years. There could also be a new entry into the market from a streamer like Amazon, Apple, or Netflix, which so far have been reasonably cautious with their investments in live sports, especially on the college side.

“Everybody will saber-rattle that there is no more money and we’re at the ceiling,” said former Duke athletics director Kevin White. “They have done that at every turn since I’ve been in this business. They will find more resources to compete. It’ll happen.” 

But insiders also worry the money spigot is no longer flowing as it once did, which could lead to a more entrenched status quo where conferences like the ACC and Big 12 continue to exist, even with a financial gap between them and the Big Ten and SEC.

“That window has closed,” said Crakes, the television consultant. “So when I hear people talking about the next level of realignment? Perhaps. It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet on it. But a lot of people in the business believe that is a fait accompli.”

In either scenario, North Carolina and Virginia stand out in the ACC as large public schools with large followings in important geographic areas where neither the Big Ten nor the SEC has either a foothold or a competitor. Both have invested heavily in athletics, football in particular, to be ready to meet whatever the moment requires. 

UNC’s Football Investment

By hiring Belichick and his high-salaried staff, plus committing to spending more to compensate players, North Carolina nearly doubled its total investment in football to about $75 million, comparable to Clemson and Florida State.

It’s a considerable investment, but it’s not all the school has done under Newmark, a former NASCAR executive and media-rights lawyer who took over this summer. This month, North Carolina’s athletic department requested $9 million from one of the school’s endowment funds to cover shortfalls. 

North Carolina is also openly exploring putting its revenue-generating athletic assets into a separate, private company, a financial tactic known by the shorthand “LLC,” for limited liability company.

Public schools like Clemson, Kentucky, and Michigan State have created LLCs to allow the business side of their athletic departments to function more like professional teams. That gives them more leeway to pursue sponsorships, real estate development, and other business strategies that can be difficult for a public university to undertake.

Newmark hopes the LLC “allows us to be more creative, more agile in how we pursue different opportunities.” Some of those will be run from within the athletic department and some won’t. “We need to be looking at every opportunity we have to use the assets available to us to generate revenue.”

An LLC could also open the door to outside investment. Only Utah has so far gone down that path with a $500 million private equity deal. Taking money from private equity or private capital would provide an instant influx of funds, but it would also come with the responsibility to provide a return on that investment.

“Private equity is in the discussion now, and a big part of that is tied to the professionalization of the student-athletes,” said Rick Burton, the David Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University. “In the absence of a collective bargaining agreement, schools are recognizing it’s going to be very difficult for them to contain costs because they’re kind of making it up on the fly.”

The Dean Smith Center, home to the men’s basketball team, is 40 years old and needs extensive repair and renovation; it lacks premium seating and modern amenities. The university has explored building a new basketball arena as part of the Carolina North development on the site of the old Horace Williams Airport. That’s a common revenue-generating trend in college athletics now: real estate developments anchored by athletic facilities, turning them into 365-day destinations.

All of these moves, from the investment in football to the potential creation of an LLC, are designed to put North Carolina in a position to compete with schools in the Big Ten and SEC that get more television money—or potentially join them.

ACC Split?

In a world where Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are in different conferences, there’s no guarantee that Duke, North Carolina, and NC State will remain aligned. A preview of that potential future will take place on December 15 in Greensboro, when the Tar Heels and Wolfpack will play a nonconference men’s basketball game since they’ll play only once in the ACC regular season.

The General Assembly or UNC System Board of Governors could potentially insist that North Carolina and NC State are a package deal in any realignment, as then-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner did in 2003 to force Virginia Tech into the ACC, but it’s unclear whether that political will still exists. Today, the power brokers in the legislature are more closely aligned with Appalachian State than with either ACC school.

Without the national profile that North Carolina has, nor the same level of investment in athletics, NC State may not be as attractive a target to the Big Ten or SEC. According to Department of Education data, NC State had $146.4 million in athletic revenue in 2024, compared with North Carolina’s $195.7 million.

“We took on the philosophy of, ‘What if we worry about being the best NC State we can be and allow that to be who we are, what we are?’” NC State athletics director Boo Corrigan told reporters in August. “It’s worked out pretty well, and I think that’s continuing with [new] Chancellor [Kevin] Howell.” 

Duke, on the other hand, had $208.2 million in athletic revenue in 2024 and has invested in both football and men’s basketball with immediate results. The Blue Devils don’t have a large alumni base like the two big public schools, but they won ACC titles in football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball last season.

“We’re going to go into these negotiations, and the ACC is going to have value,” Crakes said. “The Carolina schools all have value, especially UNC and Duke. To a certain extent NC State has some, and so does Wake Forest.”

‘Somewhat Uncomfortable’

Nobody really knows what will happen. Too many variables are outside the universities’ control, including the state of the broadcast industry, shifting political winds, the ongoing legal onslaught against the NCAA, and the persistent threat of a total power conference breakaway from the NCAA to form a 64-team superleague. In a world where the SEC threatened in court to kick LSU out of the league, anything is possible.

“Schools don’t want to get left behind,” White said. “I do feel like there’s another iteration on the horizon, and schools want to be ready for it. It’s a time where you will, at the end of day, be rewarded for being anticipatory.” 

The ACC may be picked apart for parts like the Pac-12, it may survive a few key defections and continue to exist as a second-tier conference … or it may come out the other side not only whole but competitive, if the gap in rights fees narrows.

“The ACC has great schools, and there’s a lot of unknowns for everybody in college sports right now,” Burton said. “I’m encouraged that the ACC and the Big 12 are not going to just roll over, but they’re going to have to be strategic with how they continue to accommodate their member institutions.”

Whatever happens, the Tar Heels will be at the center of it, and all they can do— all anyone can do in 2026—is try to build as strong a foundation as possible. 

The Belichick gambit and corresponding investment in football, the potential creation of an LLC, and hiring an athletic director with a professional sports background all align with that.

“It’s going to be fascinating to see how things play out,” Newmark said. “The one thing we’re confident in is, you can’t just operate the way you have for the last 40 years and be successful. You have to be comfortable being somewhat uncomfortable.”

Belichick’s tenure may not have gone as planned, but the intention behind it was not misguided. North Carolina is moving forward, with or without him, into an uncertain future. So is all of college sports.