Poor Belichick, can’t stop catching strays even in the offseason.
Ok, it’s hard to feel sorry for the legendary NFL coach with six Super Bowl rings and the second-most wins in the history of the league. But there’s no denying that it’s been a rough couple years for Bill Belichick, who was fired by the New England Patriots back in 2024 following two consecutive seasons with losing records.
Belichick was reportedly interested in making a comeback in the NFL, but when that didn’t happen he made the somewhat surprising decision to take the head coaching job at the University of North Carolina, his first head coaching job in the college ranks.
In his first season in Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels finished the 2025 season 4-8 amid reports of dysfunction and favoritism inside the program – as well as constant chatter about Belichick’s relationship with 24-year old competitive cheerleader Jordon Hudson.
Of course UNC has always been more of a basketball school anyway. But the past couple years have been tough in Chapel Hill even for the basketball program.
Legendary basketball coach Roy Williams retired following the 2020-2021 season, and was replaced by longtime assistant Hubert Davis. Although Davis had been a member of the team’s coaching staff since 2012, and had been mentored by Williams as his presumed successor, the success never really came – at least not in the way they expect at UNC.
The Tar Heels nearly won the NCAA tournament in 2022, their first season under Davis, when they lost to Kansas in the title game. But the following season the team missed the tournament altogether for the first time since 2010, and since then UNC has failed to make it out of the first round of the NCAA tournament.
The team once again made an early exit in this year’s tournament after losing to VCU in overtime, and just days later the university announced that it was parting ways with its head coach.
Obviously it’s one of the most coveted jobs in college basketball, and several big names emerged during the coaching search like Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan, who won two national championships as head coach of the Florida Gators.
Ultimately though, it wasn’t Donovan but another NBA head coach who ended up getting the Tar Heels job, with Pete Thamel reporting earlier today that UNC would be hiring Michael Malone as their next coach.
Malone most recently served as the head coach of the Denver Nuggets from 2015 until he was fired midway through the 2025 season, just two years after leading the Nuggets to the 2023 NBA Championship.
So a longtime head coach in the pros who won a championship, got fired, and is now taking his first job as a college head coach? Sounds like UNC has a type…
Well as luck would have it, legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski was live on the Pat McAfee Show when news broke that UNC would be hiring Mike Malone, so we were able to get his instant reaction. And as it turns out, Coach K immediately noted the similarities between Malone and Belichick in Chapel Hill.
McAfee jokingly asked whether UNC would now come back and “start smacking Duke around” with an NBA champion as head coach, and Belichick caught a brutal stray in Coach K’s answer:
“They had an NFL champion hired as the coach and Duke beat Carolina in football this year.
That doesn’t mean Coach Belichick isn’t a great coach, but there is time for adjustments. It takes longer, if you ever get adjusted, coming from the pros to college.”
I mean, he’s got a point…
For all the talk of college sports turning into the pros with NIL and recruiting, there’s still a big difference between building an NBA team and winning at the college level. You have to deal with the transfer portal and players leaving every year, and let’s face it…coaching 18-20 year olds is different than professional athletes.
Could Malone come in and immediately win a championship? Of course. But are there a lot of parallels between he and the head coach of their other biggest sport? Definitely.
And unfortunately for the Tar Heels, Coach K is here to point it out.
