CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — By the time Bill Belichick arrived for the news conference announcing his hire as the next North Carolina football coach, more than 200 people had crammed into a room inside Kenan Memorial Stadium. There was a palpable mix of jubilation and astonishment among longtime Tar Heels fans and boosters still amazed that their school had done something that, days earlier, might have seemed unfathomable.

Athletic director Bubba Cunningham wore a suit with the sleeves cut off, a tribute to Belichick’s signature look from his 24 years patrolling sidelines for the New England Patriots in a disheveled sweatshirt, winning six Super Bowls along the way. Media members prodded the notoriously tight-lipped coach for answers on how this unlikely match came to be. The requests UNC’s communications team fielded included “60 Minutes,” “Good Morning America” and Charles Barkley’s podcast “The Steam Room” — all hoping to land an interview with Belichick.

The school saw an influx in season-ticket purchases. Donors poured money into the program’s coffers, injecting new life into a name, image and likeness operation that the Tar Heels’ last coach, Mack Brown, routinely lamented as woefully underfunded. Recruits and transfers took note, aiming to get some face time with the NFL coaching legend before making any final decisions on a college destination.

Just as the college football world plunged into portal season, signing day and the first 12-team playoff in early December, it was North Carolina — a team that hasn’t won an ACC title since 1980 — that had become the biggest story in the sports world.

“We expected the response to be positive, but it’s been even more overwhelmingly positive than we imagined,” UNC chancellor Lee Roberts told ESPN. “We obviously wouldn’t do it if we didn’t think it was a wise investment, and it’s still early, but we couldn’t feel better about where we are with that.”

And yet, it almost didn’t happen, and within the halls of power in Chapel Hill, there’s still plenty of frustration about how this process unfolded. The biggest hire of the 2024 coaching carousel and, arguably, the biggest moment in Tar Heels football history was the product of a chaotic search filled with political persuasion that involved current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, internal backstabbing, airing of years-long grievances and a bitter boardroom drama that might’ve been more appropriate for an episode of “Succession” than the hiring of a college football coach.

Whether Belichick’s hire — or the behind-the-scenes power struggle that defined the process — ultimately results in a championship in Chapel Hill will be fodder for college football’s talking heads throughout the 2025 season. But the answer to that first big question — how, of all the possible landing spots for arguably the greatest football coach of all time, did Belichick end up at North Carolina? — is strange enough to make any eventual outcome seem plausible.

ESPN spoke with Roberts, Cunningham and more than a dozen other sources with knowledge of the process and reviewed more than 700 pages of documents obtained via a public records request to find out just how UNC landed a coaching legend.

BELICHICK’S DEPARTURE FROM the Patriots in January 2024 came with little surprise. After longtime QB Tom Brady left for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020 (where he won a seventh Super Bowl), Belichick’s teams struggled to gain traction, and a change seemed necessary for coach and franchise. What was unexpected, however, was the lack of suitors Belichick found elsewhere in the NFL, something his former offensive coordinator (and current Boston College head coach) Bill O’Brien called “shocking.”

Without an NFL job in 2024, Belichick was in limbo, but his son, Steve, landed a job as the defensive coordinator at Washington, where another member of the senior Belichick’s coaching tree, Jedd Fisch, served as head coach. Though Belichick made only a handful of visits to campus with the team, he and Fisch texted and talked regularly, giving Belichick insight into the modern college landscape.

“He’s talked about using a lot of things we do at Washington,” Fisch said. “I think he’ll fit in fine in college. He’s watched college film his whole life. When you’re a football savant, you’re always talking to numerous coaches and programs, and there’s nothing Coach loves more than teaching.”

(Belichick declined ESPN’s request to comment for this story.)

By November, Belichick was reaching out to those in his football network, gathering any insight he could on the head-coaching landscape around the country.

“You could tell it was more than just a passing interest by the questions he was asking and how diligent he was,” one source close to Belichick told ESPN. “He’s like that with everything but … he absolutely wanted to coach again.”

Over the years, Belichick has kept meticulous notes in a Google doc that detail specific plans on how to run an organization. As one source indicated, it’s sort of a philosophical “how-to guide,” which took on an almost mythical aura during UNC’s pursuit, as reports swirled of a “400-page manifesto” that he’d pitched to UNC leadership as a blueprint for the program.

Belichick downplayed the “manifesto” in his introductory news conference. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he said. But his close confidant and now general manager at UNC Michael Lombardi confirmed in a December interview with “The Pat McAfee Show” that Belichick did share his notes with Roberts.

“I know this: Coach Belichick knows exactly what he wants to do with this program,” Lombardi said, “and in that document … is exactly what the Patriot Way was all about.” (Lombardi declined to speak with ESPN for this story.)

The UNC job also offered Belichick another potential perk: autonomy.

“He missed coaching, and he wanted a chance to build his own program and do it his way,” O’Brien said. “That’s hard to do in the NFL nowadays because you have partnerships with a GM and an owner. Bill’s always done it his way, his program.”

After a 3-4 start to the season, the writing was on the wall that North Carolina — a place where Belichick’s father once coached — was ready for a new path forward. And Belichick was ready to make his pitch.

WHEN NORTH CAROLINA parted ways with Larry Fedora after a miserable 2-9 campaign in 2018, the school turned to an aging Hall of Famer with ties to a different era of Tar Heels football. Back then, it was Mack Brown, and the plan worked — to a degree.

Brown took UNC to an ACC title game and an Orange Bowl, and he helped develop quarterback Drake Maye into a first-round NFL draft pick. But the same frustrating dynamic emerged: UNC would flirt with a breakthrough and then crumble under the weight of increased expectations.

Behind the scenes, those frustrations played out in a seemingly endless power struggle between the school’s athletics administration, its board of trustees and Brown, who felt UNC was not properly invested in football. Those grievances bubbled over publicly in May 2024 when members of the board of trustees tried to hold AD Bubba Cunningham accountable for deficits in the school’s athletic budget incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Board member Jennifer Halsey Evans suggested the budget had been mismanaged, and board chair John Preyer said the school should try to sue the ACC, as fellow members Clemson and Florida State had, in an effort to find a more robust TV deal elsewhere. (FSU and Clemson have since settled.)

Multiple sources said the showdown began with complaints from Brown to his close ally, Preyer, about the lack of funding for the program, which one football source said caused “a slow bleed” of talent, because of a lack of financial firepower. Preyer used the opportunity to publicly undercut Cunningham’s stewardship of the athletics department, calling for an internal audit of its budget, which was approved by the board but never ultimately completed, according to board member Vinay Patel, who chairs the audit committee. Eight months later, the school reported record revenue for athletics.

“This was, for me, not going to be a witch hunt on Bubba,” Patel said. “It was all about finding out why we weren’t in the black over there and if there’s something we could do to make a difference.”

Preyer did not respond to ESPN’s request for comment on this story.

From there, the board was focused on ways to inject new revenue into athletics, which would play a major role in the recruitment of Belichick six months later. Before that could happen, however, the game of thrones between Cunningham, Brown and the board reached its nadir in the Tar Heels’ locker room Sept. 21, 2024, after an embarrassing 70-50 loss to James Madison.

An emotional Brown, 73 and the oldest active head coach in FBS football entering the 2024 season, told his team he was ready to walk away. Several players and administrators assumed Brown had just quit. Rumors swirled that the Hall of Fame coach would resign. Brown ultimately backtracked, saying he wanted to stay if the team still believed in him.

By that point, however, the die was cast.

Brown stayed on for the remainder of the season, with the school planning a formal announcement of his retirement at various points, but the death of UNC football player Tylee Craft and a midseason winning streak scuttled those plans. Though Brown had assured Cunningham of his intention to retire, by mid-November people close to Brown began to speculate he might actually push to return for one more year. In a news conference Nov. 25, Brown suggested that was exactly what he intended to do. This was a bridge too far for Cunningham, who phoned Brown from Hawaii, where the men’s basketball team was playing, and fired the school’s all-time winningest coach. UNC announced the move the following day.

Despite expressing his own reservations about Brown’s tenure to UNC administrators following losses to JMU and Duke, Preyer, according to sources, called Cunningham’s handling of Brown’s dismissal “shameful.”

The saga — and the struggle for power inside the program — would set the tone for how North Carolina would ultimately replace Brown with another 70-something legend.

CUNNINGHAM BEGAN TO plan for a coaching transition following the JMU game, but it wasn’t until November that the biggest name in the search was added to his list.

Belichick first sent word of his interest in the UNC job through political allies. He reached out to a longtime friend, former U.S. senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who then contacted Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, hoping to light a fire in Chapel Hill in support of Belichick.

“Rubio follows the sports world pretty closely, and he called me and said, ‘There’s a chance Belichick would come to Chapel Hill,'” Tillis told ESPN. “He said, ‘He wants a school with a great academic reputation, and he wants to try to build a program to bring them a national championship. I said, ‘Well, let me go [make some calls].'”

Tillis hung up the phone and immediately called Phil Berger, the North Carolina Senate president pro tempore, who had strong connections with power players at UNC. Berger initially laughed at the suggestion until Tillis assured him that, yes, Belichick truly wanted the job.

That became the spark that lit the fuse, and before long, the Belichick chase was a raging inferno among key stakeholders, including Preyer. As one source put it, “the push to land Belichick all started with the politicians.”

Roberts declined to comment on the roles Rubio, Tillis and Berger played in greasing the wheels for Belichick but said he’s “been really pleased with the support we’ve gotten across the board.”

Belichick’s camp made more direct overtures Nov. 12, when Lombardi contacted Cunningham to gauge his interest in the former Patriots coach, according to documents obtained via a public records request by ESPN. At the time, Cunningham told Lombardi there was no formal decision on Brown’s future, and he declined to speak to potential candidates until Brown’s departure was official.

In truth, however, Cunningham had his sights set on another former NFL head coach — former UNC player and current Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith.

Cunningham first reached out to Smith in early November, simply to gauge his interest in a job that was not yet officially open. No interviews took place, though the two sides kept in touch. Smith was intrigued, and he was seen as a consensus candidate at UNC, with support from Roberts and board members.

“They were all hopeful they could lure Smith back to Chapel Hill, and then whether it was Belichick or anybody else, it would have been a moot point. Smith is who they wanted,” one source said.

By late November, however, UNC’s overtures became public knowledge, and Smith was uncomfortable being seen as undercutting Brown before a final decision was made on the incumbent’s future, a source said. On Nov. 28, Smith told reporters he had a preliminary conversation about the opening, but he was happy in the NFL. Smith’s recusal shook up the search and seemed to energize several board members in their quest to land Belichick.

“After that,” a source said, “is when [the hiring process] all started to fray.”

ON NOV. 30, CUNNINGHAM was on a conference call with UNC leadership to discuss candidates. He’d compiled a list of more than 30 names, including Army head coach Jeff Monken, Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall and Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell. Several board members, including Preyer and Evans, were adamant that Belichick was the school’s best — perhaps only — real option.

What followed, according to multiple sources, was effectively two separate coaching searches — one run by Cunningham and the athletic department and one run by UNC board members focused entirely on landing Belichick.

According to several sources, board members viewed Belichick as something akin to Colorado’s hiring of Deion Sanders — a public relations and financial windfall that had the added benefit of improving the team on the field.

“In order to fundraise, you need engagement, and you need alums who have a vested interest in what’s happening here at the university,” board of trustees member Jennifer Lloyd said during the Belichick introductory press conference. “It all works together.”

As the Belichick-to-North Carolina talk picked up steam, other candidates began to question North Carolina’s commitment to an open coaching search. Campbell declined UNC’s interview request, and Sumrall, after meeting with UNC leadership — including Roberts and Cunningham — in New Orleans on Dec. 7, withdrew his name from consideration. Sumrall ultimately signed an extension with Tulane on Dec. 9.

“Things just didn’t align, and it seemed like [Cunningham] was being boxed out,” a source said. “It was like, ‘What’s really going on?'”

Another source added: “It sounded like Auburn all over again when they hired Bryan Harsin.”

Days later, word leaked of Belichick’s interest in the UNC job, putting the spotlight squarely on Cunningham to either hire a legendary head coach or take the blame for allowing the Tar Heels to miss out on a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

The disconnect became something of an open secret, and while some viewed a Belichick hire as a dream come true, board members and UNC leadership also received their share of pushback from fans and alumni.

“This is embarrassing,” read one email obtained via a public records request. “We’re being dog-walked by a 72-year-old coach after we just let a 73-year-old call the shots for years.”

“The Carolina community implores you to get this one right,” an email to Preyer urged, “and to let Bubba Cunningham do his job.”

The publicity — good or bad — derived from Belichick’s inclusion in the coaching search was proof enough for the board that he could deliver eyeballs and money for UNC.

“It’s good for us,” Lloyd said at Belichick’s hiring news conference. “It’s national attention.”

On Dec. 5, Belichick met with UNC officials in New York City, while he and his girlfriend Jordon Hudson were in the city to attend The Museum Gala at the American Museum of Natural History. At that time, according to sources, UNC remained dubious a deal could be done, and there was concern that Belichick was simply using the Tar Heels as leverage to land another NFL job. Cunningham continued to talk with other candidates, something that frustrated Preyer and other board members, who then took the unorthodox step of submitting what amounted to an offer sheet to Belichick’s agent without Roberts or Cunningham’s approval.

This had two critical ripple effects: It scared off virtually all other serious options — with Cleveland Browns tight end coach Tommy Rees at this point viewed as the only remaining alternative — and it handed all the negotiating leverage to Belichick.

“It was obvious the UNC administration wanted Belichick by that time,” a source said. “His side and UNC were just trying to hammer out all the details, which took some time because Belichick wanted a lot, but UNC also wanted to make sure they still had a horse in the race if Belichick left them at the altar.”

Roberts and Cunningham became aware of the unofficial offer on Dec. 6, and two days later, Roberts and UNC’s legal team — but notably, not Cunningham — flew to Massachusetts to meet with Belichick in his office, open to finalizing a deal but aware they couldn’t give him what Preyer had already offered. According to sources, there was a presumption this could mark an abrupt end to negotiations.

Belichick’s demands were unprecedented for a place like UNC. Brown made $5 million per year. Belichick wanted more than double that figure. He also insisted on autonomy over the program and a sizable increase in the salary pool for assistants, and he wanted a minimum commitment from the school for player acquisition that would’ve exceeded UNC’s planned revenue-sharing distribution. According to reports, he also asked to have his son Steve tabbed as a “head coach in waiting.” Multiple sources confirmed Steve Belichick’s future as head coach at UNC was discussed but never put in writing, and the idea was “a non-starter” during negotiations.

On Dec. 9, Belichick appeared on “The Pat McAfee Show” and acknowledged his talks with UNC, putting the pressure on the Tar Heels to close the deal.

The final negotiations with Belichick on Dec. 11 were tense, as Cunningham and UNC worked to scrape back as much from the board’s unofficial offer as possible. To make the numbers work, Roberts had to commit to spending university funds to cover the increased expenses for football.

Ultimately, Belichick accepted the job — and a five-year, $50 million contract — at which point all parties pivoted to celebration mode. In all, UNC agreed to a nearly 25% increase in football spending. That included $1.5 million annually to Lombardi.

“It is a risk,” Cunningham told ESPN. “But the university believes there can be a greater return on our investment with the money we are going to spend.”

Still, there were concerns.

For one, reports continued to swirl of NFL teams interested in talking to Belichick, and public records obtained by ESPN showed the school was closely monitoring any news that their new coach could make a quick pivot back to the pros. Belichick’s contract, which was officially signed Jan. 25, contains a buyout of $10 million if Belichick should depart prior to June 1, 2025. Beyond that date, the buyout drops to just $1 million.

Public records also illustrated the school’s appreciation for the pitfalls of the hire. Belichick was a huge name, and this was a potentially momentous opportunity to woo fans and donors, but it was also true the six-time Super Bowl winner had never coached a college game.

An early draft of a script for UNC leadership’s remarks announcing the hire suggested Belichick would be a strong fit for a changing college football landscape that increasingly resembles the NFL, something that garnered pushback from the PR firm working to help refine the school’s messaging. “Do we lean into the changing nature of college sports, because there is some question if he is the right person to lead that change,” offered one member of the PR consultancy, according to documents obtained by a public records request from ESPN.

The reply: “It won’t pass the giggle test.”

Instead, UNC pivoted to a message of “excellence, winning and success.”

That debate underscored concerns Cunningham and others in the athletics department had about the hire. Sources said Roberts and Cunningham were “in lockstep” throughout the process, but there were serious reservations over the notion of handing the future of the football program over to a 72-year-old with no prior college experience. Preyer and other members of the board were emphatic, however, and ultimately Cunningham and Roberts were convinced.

If Preyer and his allies on the board of trustees got their way, however, the power play ultimately proved damaging for them, too.

On Jan. 16, UNC system president Peter Hans wrote a memo to Preyer and Roberts excoriating the board’s handling of Belichick’s hiring, according to a report from The Assembly, and moved to limit the board’s power with regard to athletics in the future.

“Instances continue to occur where members of the board appear to act independently of their campus’s administration in matters squarely within the responsibility of the chancellor,” Hans wrote, according to The Assembly. “[Such actions] create substantial legal risk to the University — jeopardizing the North Carolina taxpayers’ money by blurring the lines of actual and apparent authority when these athletic departments negotiate business transactions with third parties.”

Still, the hire was a watershed moment.

“It’s the get of the college football world,” Tillis said. “When the opportunity presented itself, I thought any school of similar stature — going after him they would’ve considered even if they were satisfied with their coach. I think he’ll build up a program that shows you can have great student-athletes and a real shot at a national championship.”

Fisch said he expects the new UNC coach “will do great. He’s an elite coach and a fantastic person.” O’Brien, who’ll go toe-to-toe with his former boss in the ACC this year, said the hire “is great for college football, and it’s great for the ACC. The ACC takes a lot of grief, right? But here you’ve got the greatest coach of all time coming to the ACC.”

When Belichick held his first news conference of the spring on March 5, he was peppered with a handful of inquiries on all the ways his life in college differed from the NFL.

Surely the assembled masses had hoped for something more profound, but Belichick — a man as gifted at avoiding a noteworthy soundbite as he is at coaching football — offered answers that were unsurprisingly banal.

“Fundamentals are fundamentals,” he said. “Zone coverage is zone. Man is man.”

The biggest difference, he said, was the hash marks.

The arrival of a legend hasn’t changed the basic contours of football at North Carolina. Belichick isn’t reinventing the game. He won’t wave a magic wand that suddenly turns a perennial underachiever into a championship contender, even if his arrival does feel like some gift from the football gods.

And yet, on the field, there was one obvious shift from the days of old. The players darted through familiar drills, but all were wearing blank jerseys — some blue, some white, but all devoid of name plates, a UNC logo or a jersey number. They’d been stripped of anything that might’ve identified them as a Tar Heels football player beyond the job they were doing on the field.

One reporter asked Belichick how he had explained this particular quirk to his players before spring practices began.

The answer, of course, is he hadn’t.

This is, perhaps, why Belichick is really here — to strip North Carolina of the identity it’s long held, one marked by false hope and disappointing finishes, and to build something new from the ground up.