Blog Article
North Carolina Needs $29 Million To Fire Bill Belichick. He Needs $1 Million To Walk Away From Them.
John Preyer, you sent the offer sheet.
You were running the North Carolina Board of Trustees in December 2024 when ESPN says you put a contract in front of Bill Belichick’s agent without bothering to ask Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director whose entire job that was. Then you called an emergency meeting, closed the doors, and handed a 72-year-old man 5 years and $50 million. The first 3 guaranteed.
You did remember to run the cost analysis, though. On the professors.
A lawsuit says your board studied the 30-year cost of granting a faculty member tenure and never ran a single number on the football contract. You wanted to know what a tenured chemist would run you in 2054. You did not want to know what Bill Belichick would run you in 2027.
It runs $29 million. You found out in 11 months.
He can leave for $1 million
Here is the door you built for him, and it does not lock.
Belichick can end this himself for $1 million, payable within 180 days. That number dropped from $10 million in June of 2025, before he had coached one college snap. You owe him $29 million to make him go. He owes you a rounding error to walk. Thirty to one, and the cheap door is his.
A guarantee protects a coach from losing football games. Nobody in Chapel Hill is losing football games anymore. They are answering questions from lawyers.
31 NFL teams read the same file you did
Eight head coaching jobs came open in the NFL in 2024, and he got 1 serious interview.
Atlanta talked to him twice and hired Raheem Morris. Everybody else passed without picking up the phone. They were not confused about whether he could coach. They said out loud, on the record, that he would rebuild the command structure around himself, and The Athletic reported that clubs which had just hired somebody else felt relief about it.
You gave him personnel authority in writing anyway, and let him hire his own general manager.
He hired Michael Lombardi, who had not worked in college football since 1984, when he was recruiting coordinator at UNLV. Lombardi announced that North Carolina was the NFL’s 33rd team. The 33rd team went 4-8, beat nobody with a winning record, lost to all 3 in-state rivals and sent 0 players to the draft off a 41-man roster overhaul.
The season, with the padding removed
They beat Charlotte, an FCS team from Richmond, a 3-9 Syracuse, and a 4-8 Stanford.
Take Charlotte and Richmond out, and what is left is 2-8 against Power 4 opposition at minus 11.5 points a game. Adjust for schedule strength, and the year grades 100th of 136 nationally, the second-worst Carolina season since 2000, and 10.53 points below the 6-year average of the coach he replaced. Two computer systems looked at the schedule and called it easier than average.
Mack Brown got let go for going 6-7. This was worse by every measure anyone keeps.
Then the 33rd team called HR
Lombardi went on paid administrative leave on July 27, 3 days before the first practice.
The university says its Office of University Counsel is investigating. The Athletic says the leave came out of a human resources complaint and that the College Sports Commission has come around asking about the program. Somebody asked Belichick about that Thursday morning and got this: “Yeah, next question. We can’t talk about it.”
The greatest defensive mind in football history just called a coverage on his own general manager.
The handbook caps this kind of leave at 30 days, which means the whole thing resolves before the opener against TCU in Dublin on August 29. Twenty-one days before that game, Belichick goes into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
Enjoy Ohio, coach. The lawyers will still be here when you get back.
Read the full story
The newsletter version has the coronation, the girlfriend, the donor letter, what Bobby Petrino’s last 2 stops did to the head coaches who hired him, and The Market Read on the win total.
