Thamel: Bill Belichick, North Carolina and college football's new world

Nebraska coach Matt Rhule returned to college football two years ago after a stint with the Carolina Panthers. Above his desk in his office in Lincoln sat a congratulatory bottle of Dom Perignon, courtesy of his friend Bill Belichick.

Rhule looks back at the spring of 2023 as a much simpler time in college sports. He calls the sport "completely different" now, using movie metaphors to sum up the current flux.

"It's like 'Boiler Room' meets 'The Wolf of Wall Street,'" Rhule joked with ESPN. "I can't tell you how many coaches are saying, 'What's happening and what are we doing?'"

In 2025, the most compelling story in college football will be Bill Belichick's debut season as the head coach at North Carolina. How will he navigate the sport's chaotic moment? Though Belichick has never coached in college football, it's safe to say that under the new structure of the sport, he'll be as prepared as any coach in the country.

The very chaos coaches are struggling to manage -- building a salary cap model, handling transfer portal free agency and making hard roster choices -- is exactly what he navigated for decades in the NFL as the head coach and de facto general manager of the Patriots and Browns. And it's precisely why he's bringing in Mike Lombardi -- a former NFL GM with more than a quarter-century experience helping build teams such as New England and Cleveland in various personnel positions -- as UNC's general manager.

And that's why coaches around college football believe the chaos of the landscape could end up as Belichick's competitive advantage. He'll be taking decades of practical experience and applying it in a different setting.

Belichick is coming to college ball "on the forefront of a whole new era," Rhule notes. And while there have been predictably gloomy takes about Belichick adjusting to the quirks, pains and unique demands of the college game, the case for optimism springs from the simple fact that he enters the sport as the coach perhaps best equipped for the new era.

College football in 2025 is simply professional football that's adjacent to a university, awash with nostalgia and backed by a soundtrack from the band and the fight song. The sport has never looked closer to the NFL, with schools expected to be able to directly pay athletes next year, pending a judge's ruling in the spring. Belichick's contract dictates that he'll have access to $13 million of the nearly $20.5 million schools such as UNC can slate for revenue sharing.

The signs of where the sport is going became florescent in the opening 24 hours of Belichick's tenure. He has clauses in his contract for a general manager hire at up to $1.5 million, a support staff budget totaling $5.3 million and $1 million for strength and conditioning personnel in addition to his own salary of $10 million. None of that includes the $10 million for assistant coaches. The GM salary is capped at a level almost double the highest one currently known in college football.

"That's a big boy investment," an industry source said. "UNC is definitely going all-in on this."

With Lombardi onboard, Belichick is setting out to build an NFL-style front office. And be certain, the rest of college football is watching closely.

The case for Belichick to thrive at UNC is simple: He and Lombardi have decades of experience running a disciplined and innovative front office. They are experienced at evaluating and assigning value to players, negotiating contracts, making disciplined decisions and maximizing resources. Few college coaches can match that or are in programs structured to do so efficiently, considering few programs have GMs with that background.

"Coach Belichick and Mike Lombardi have been a formidable team in several spots over the years," Rutgers coach Greg Schiano told ESPN. "Their intelligence and capacity to work will translate to any level of football."

Read any of the books about Belichick or study how he built his dynasty in New England, and roster construction came down to bloodless efficiency. While it certainly helped to have Tom Brady -- and at a discount for many years -- the management of the whole roster was done boldly and devoid of emotion.

The system Belichick and Lombardi developed in Cleveland in the 1990s to assign value to players remains used in the NFL by personnel departments, Rhule pointed out.

"It's something that they invented, and a lot of us in college are still trying to learn," Rhule said. "The whole thing in college now is how you value your own roster and do you choose to replace them."

He predicts Belichick will be "fantastic" at UNC, saying he also understands why the head coach of six Super Bowl-winning teams is making the jump.

Much like how NFL franchises scrambled to hire former Belichick assistants and New England front office members over the past two decades, don't be surprised if other colleges watch Belichick and Lombardi's every move. They have a transferrable skill set that has never mattered more in college football.

"I think he will try and replicate an NFL standard and process for player procurement and development and scale that at a high level," said ESPN analyst Mike Tannenbaum, the former NFL executive who worked with Belichick on the 33rd team and worked for Belichick in New York and Cleveland. "His experience in making decisions contextually, that skill set is now of the utmost importance in the new paradigm of college football."

How quickly have things changed in college football? Former Ohio State and Florida coach Urban Meyer chuckles at how "labor-intensive" recruiting used to be. College coaches would have to hang out all day in high schools, cozy up to guidance counselors and sweet-talk grandmas.

Meyer said a college basketball coach told him recently: "You'd love this recruiting. I don't recruit. No more notecards. No more texting 70 times a day or talking to the kid's girlfriend or uncle. It's a whole different animal."

Though there's still plenty of charm and boots-on-the-ground work required, the reality of high-end college recruiting in 2025 is that the contract offer trumps stadium size, weight room glitz and the doggedness of the pursuit. High school recruiting is essentially the draft. The portal is free agency.

Also paramount: Many of the agents working with the top college football players are the same ones Belichick dealt with for years in the NFL. Their confidence in his ability to train, develop and teach players should not be underestimated.

Belichick always seemed to find joy in unearthing the hidden gems, a list that starts with sixth-round draft choice Brady. It also notably includes Cal State Bakersfield national champion wrestler Stephen Neal, Penn State lacrosse star Chris Hogan, USC backup quarterback Matt Cassel, Ohio State specialist Nate Ebner and converted Kent State quarterback Julian Edelman.

"You are looking at other people's rosters and finding ancillary players and finding something that they can add to your team," a veteran NFL front office member said. "That's what Bill Belichick is the best in the world at."

Winning in 2025 and beyond is likely to require maximizing revenue-share money and outside NIL opportunities to create a high-end roster. Around college football, some programs are already trying to bring in NFL people -- be it as consultants or staff -- to install similar systems to those Belichick and Lombardi invented in Cleveland.

Stanford recognized this changing landscape by putting Andrew Luck in charge of the entire football program. That's where the sport is going -- player procurement eventually trumping the coach as the central focus of the program. It's just hard to convince coaches of that right now, as athletic directors would prefer this model, but most head coaches won't willingly give up power.

Belichick already laid out his recruiting pitch on "The Pat McAfee Show" last week, and it's a powerful one: He called the program "a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL."

The potential for immediate success will be known fairly soon, as it will be directly related to the caliber of player Belichick can attract in the transfer portal. It will be fascinating to see how he balances high school recruiting, which does not always translate to immediate success, with picking the right portal guys who fit under a salary cap.

He also has a 2025 schedule against no program that finished in the top 15 of the College Football Playoff rankings, and just two that ended up ranked at all -- a home game against Clemson and a road matchup at Syracuse. With a strong roster refresh, UNC could be favored in 10 or 11 games next season. The things Belichick does well in scheme, situational football and managing games will surely translate.

"He's got a great plan, knows exactly what he wants to convey," Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz said. "Every player wants to ultimately play in the NFL. Everyone wanted to play for Nick Saban because they felt like it was going to help them go to the NFL. That'd be a similar blueprint to what Coach Belichick is going to do."

There will be challenges and adjustments for Belichick. How he'll handle the college clutter will be an integral part of this -- academic meetings, compliance department bureaucracy and the vagaries of an unregulated system of free agency, for example.

One coach summed up the challenges facing Belichick this way: "I just think the day-to-day interactions with players is more than the NFL, meaning you are doing more life skills development and academics. You are involved in those conversations on a daily basis with players, parents and tutors and academics."

Just how intensive recruiting will be is an interesting aspect of this transition. But remember: Belichick has never been afraid to work. NFL draft lore is filled with him showing up at places like Middle Tennessee State to run potential priority free agents through a workout.

There is a lot of nonsense in college football -- small talk with boosters, bowl reps and other characters. But Belichick has always found a way to eliminate nonsense to stay focused on his job of winning games.

"It's stuff outside the game," a college coach said, "that's what's wearing on coaches right now -- stuff outside of football."

Belichick is 72 and the terms of his deal hint that this won't be a lengthy engagement, as his $10 million annual salary is guaranteed for only three seasons. After June 1, he'd owe UNC just $1 million to leave.

That doesn't dim the interest, as the one of the most innovative coaches in NFL history is arriving in college at a moment rife with wholesale changes. Look for Belichick to set the trends, not follow them.