North Carolina turns to Bill Belichick as next football coach

Six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach Bill Belichick has agreed to a five-year deal to become the next coach at North Carolina.

The school announced the hiring Wednesday night, roughly a week after the 72-year-old Belichick’s name surfaced as an unlikely candidate to replace the program’s winningest all-time coach in Mack Brown.

The deal requires approval by UNC trustees, though that board hadn’t announced a new meeting as of Wednesday night. An introductory news conference has yet to be scheduled.

“We know that college athletics is changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking,” UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “Bill Belichick is a football legend, and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina football can evolve, compete and win — today and in the future.”

The school announced Nov. 26 that Brown wouldn’t return for a seventh season in his second stint in Chapel Hill, a firing that became effective after the program’s all-time wins leader coached his finale in the Nov. 30 loss to rival N.C. State.

Moving on from the 73-year-old Brown to hire the 72-year-old Belichick means UNC is turning to a coach who has never worked at the college level, yet had incredible success in the NFL alongside quarterback Tom Brady throughout most of his 24-year tenure with the Patriots, which ended last season.

Belichick had been linked to NFL jobs in the time since, notably the Atlanta Falcons in January. That’s why word of Belichick’s conversations with UNC — first reported by Inside Carolina and confirmed by the AP last week — stirred such surprise as an unexpected and unconventional route for both sides to take.

But the two sides had been in discussions for several days working on terms before finally reaching an agreement to cap what seemed an improbable outcome only a week earlier.