JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Next season, the University of North Carolina will have a new football coach, Bill Belichick. He's one of the greatest coaches to ever live. He won six Super Bowls while in charge of the New England Patriots. But the question remains, can he turn around a football team at a school that is better-known for its basketball program? Stewart Mandel is editor-in-chief for The Athletic's college football coverage, and he's going to try to help us make sense of it all. Hey there.
STEWART MANDEL: Hi.
SUMMERS: So, Stewart, after this news was announced, you wrote that North Carolina hiring Bill Belichick as their coach is a bit of a risky move for the school. You said they might even regret it. Why?
MANDEL: There's been a long history of coaches from the NFL coming to college, big reputations with big visions for kind of reinventing college football, making it more like the NFL. And it rarely works because they're such different sports. They're probably more similar now than they used to be because college football now has the transfer portal, which is a lot like free agency in the NFL. But you still have to recruit. You still have to recruit high school players. You don't have a draft. You don't get to pick your own players. And Bill Belichick has never coached in college, so he's never had any of those experiences that make a college coach so successful.
SUMMERS: You mentioned the fact that he is not the first ex-NFL coach who's been hired to take over to turn around a college football program. Give me a couple of examples of coaches who have made that switch that might offer some clues about how Belichick will do when he heads to UNC.
MANDEL: The one guy that was really the outlier is Pete Carroll. He had been fired in the NFL, and he came to USC. And he turned them into a powerhouse, but it wasn't by importing the NFL model. It was a very college program, and he was a fanatical recruiter. More recently, we've seen Herm Edwards go to Arizona State. Charlie Weis was the coach at Notre Dame and then later the coach at Kansas. And these were coaches who were more focused on the Xs and Os and scheme, and that was - that didn't work out. You know, they would have some initial success. They weren't able to sustain a program. And that's what I think you have to worry about if you're UNC. He might come in and have a great year next year.
SUMMERS: Right.
MANDEL: There's certainly going to be a lot of buzz around him, and it's going to help them recruit. But what does it look like in three, four years, frankly, if he's even still their coach at that point?
SUMMERS: OK, but I mean, at the same time, you're talking about a guy who is a storied NFL coach. I mean, he clearly knows his way around a football field. He's got an immense amount of skill. Can you just talk about the assets that he brings to this program, the kind of reasons why a place like UNC might want to bring him in?
MANDEL: Well, I think the No. 1 asset is guys that come to college want to go to the NFL. Not all of them do, but, you know, they come with the hopes of getting in the NFL. And he can say - and be totally credible in saying it - I know what it takes to be a successful NFL player. I can help you achieve those goals. And that's going to be a big selling point. He also has experience negotiating a salary cap, which is coming to college sports this coming year, but it's brand-new. So most of the people in college athletics have never had to negotiate salaries. So, you know, some of those things from the NFL that frankly weren't relevant to college even a couple years ago are now going to be a big part of college football going forward.
SUMMERS: Got about a minute left here. I know, because I spend a lot of Sundays watching the NFL, that there are a whole lot of NFL teams that are probably going to be in need of a new coach after this season and watching their performance. Why do you think Belichick chose college over waiting for another pro job?
MANDEL: Well, it's interesting 'cause right before I came on here, they released the terms of his contract. And basically, it's going to cost him almost no money to leave for an NFL job after this season - after next season, after this coming year. So it's kind of - in that case, it's a no-lose situation. He comes in, and if he has success and if the NFL is more interested in him next year, he can go. He says he won't. We'll have to see. But, you know, he wasn't really garnering much interest from NFL teams. If he goes to UNC and has a great year - could be a much different story.
SUMMERS: All right. We'll keep watching, That is Stewart Mandel, editor-in-chief of The Athletic's college football coverage. Stewart, thanks.
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