The Bill Belichick era of UNC football gets underway on Monday night against TCU at Kenan Stadium.

With an entirely revamped roster featuring 70 additions, including 30 true freshmen and 40 transfers, it is very difficult to predict just what level the Tar Heels are at.

Belichick has taken over at UNC after 29 years in the NFLCredit: Getty
The history between the two sides, though, is heavily imbalanced, with UNC having come out victorious on all three occasions against TCU.

The Tar Heels also have a reputation for starting off new seasons on the front foot, having won all four of their last season openers when their head coach has made their debut.

Overall, UNC head coaches have a record of 26-11-2 for debut openers, and Belichick will be hoping to follow suit.

However, ‘Chapel Bill’ – who signed a lucrative $10 million contract with the Tar Heels not including bonuses – doesn’t exactly have history on his side.
The 73-year-old has lost both of his two previous encounters when debuting as a head coach, doing so in 1991 with the NFL franchise Cleveland Browns, and in 2000 with the New England Patriots.He would of course go on to lead the Patriots to six Super Bowl titles in his two-decade tenure at the helm, and UNC are hoping that he will enjoy similar success with the NCAA college football program.

Transfer Gio Lopez – formerly of the South Alabama Jaguars – has been named the starting quarterback for Belichick’s side, but the other starters are still unknown.

As expected, this makes it extremely difficult for opposition head coach Sonny Dykes to prepare his own team as he schemes to go against arguably the greatest coach in NFL history, with more than 50 years of service on the biggest stage in football.

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In fact, Dykes publicly spoke of the challenges facing him and his side as they go into Monday’s contest.

He admitted: “Hard to game-plan. I mean, we don’t have really much of an idea exactly what we’re going to see … you know?

Belichick begins a new era of UNC footballCredit: Getty
“It’s not easy, but that’s kind of the first game, and particularly when you’ve got a new coaching staff on top of that, and then you also have a coach that’s transitioning from the NFL to college football. So there’s a lot of unknowns.”

But Dykes has been in this position once before, having to face against another high-profile debutant in NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders when he moved over from Jackson State in an attempt to revive the mediocre Colorado Buffaloes in 2023.

Unfortunately, the Horned Frogs were on the losing side on that occasion, narrowly losing 45-42 after Shedeur Sanders erupted for 510 yards and four touchdowns after completing 38 of his 47 pass attempts.

But Dykes has treated that outing as a learning experience, and goes into his first match up against the hugely experienced Belichick with those learnings in mind.

“I think we’ve taken a little bit of a different approach as coaches for sure,” he said. “One thing that happened that year was we had a lot of new faces, too.

“We were trying to instill our culture, because we had had kind of a senior group in ’22, and then we lost, I think, seven juniors to the NFL draft. And so we got two real classes of players, really recruiting classes, kind of moved on.
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“We felt like we weren’t as far along as a team and as a program and as a culture, quite frankly, as we needed to be, and so, you know, I think all of us coaches were certainly concerned…”We didn’t do as good a job of getting the guys’ attention, probably, as we should have.”
One of the nation’s most anticipated games of the opening weekend, all eyes will be firmly fixed on whether Belichick can get off to a winning start, or whether his cursed NFL debut record has come over to the college game with him.