UNC Football 2026 Position Preview: Coaching
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After three weeks of deep dives into every position group that will take the field for the University of North Carolina, it’s game week, and it’s finally time to finish by getting into the straw that will be stirring the drink. The crew on the sidelines. The Carolina coaching staff, led by a guy with as much publicity over the last year as any head coach in college football. UNC Football usually isn’t in this level of spotlight, but right now, even if I weren’t writing for a website about UNC Athletics, I could probably safely assume that my readers knew that we’re approaching Bill Belichick’s second season in Chapel Hill.
The first, of course, was a historic-level embarrassment on and off the field. It quickly became clear that Belichick and Mike Lombardi had underestimated the differences between the college game and the pro game and assumed that Belichick’s NFL track record would allow them to cruise to success in the NCAA, and that spilled over into a lot of the guys they hired to join them on the sidelines, many of whom had little to no college coaching experience. The team was bad, but more importantly for this analysis, it was bad in a way that squarely put the focus on subpar performance from the coaches. It started with recruiting, because UNC was at a talent deficit against every team it played save for Charlotte, Richmond, Syracuse, Stanford, and maybe Cal. But they didn’t just lose because they were less talented. They ranked 97th in penalties taken per game, with 6.8. Players lost composure at the worst of times, leading to several last-minute losses. The team was unprepared for basically any wrinkle thrown at them, from a double-pass to open the Clemson game to the fake field goal conversion that sealed the Duke one. On money downs, the defense folded and the offense didn’t step up. Those are all indicators of a team that’s not well-coached on a fundamental, football level. Belichick, the ostensible football mastermind, should have at least been able to avoid that, even if talent and playcalling deficiencies would have led to a similar win/loss record.
Belichick really wants us to believe that this year will be different. He’s made some staff changes, the removal of the spring portal has meant that he’s had more time with the final version of his roster, and he’s had time and opportunity to review where he went wrong in how he went about his business last year. Let’s take a look at the man and the crew around him, and at the end we’ll wrap up with a few closing thoughts.
What’s the same
Obviously, Belichick and his general manager Mike Lombardi are back, Lombardi’s administrative leave notwithstanding. Through his multiple media appearances last year, Lombardi made it clear ahead of the season that he and Belichick expected to tear through college football purely on the basis of being Bill Belichick and his friend. When that didn’t happen, they quickly pivoted, sending a message first to donors (that soon leaked) and then to the wider fanbase that they were actually undertaking a huge, from-the-studs rebuild, and so the early goings were never going to be pretty, especially when they were dealing with 70 players new to them and each other. They bolstered this claim by recruiting a massive, 40-player freshman class that joined the team this year; there’s no clearer sign of a rebuild than a young team. Of course, with the addition of a 20-player portal class, that means they’ve got 60 new players this year and an already-tested excuse in the chamber for if and when this season goes belly-up.
Recruiting and messaging aside, the coaching job from the head man on the field was also pretty poor. A man famous for winning with team discipline, hidden yardage, time management, and superior awareness showed absolutely none of that acumen when gameday rolled around. I mentioned the penalties already, but all season long, there were examples of wasted timeouts, mismanaged middle-eights, special teams miscues and misevaluations, and just plain not knowing his roster. Maybe the college game just sped up on him and a year of reflection has left him able to be the Bill Belichick we remember, but I have a hard time believing that in addition to being unprepared for the new demands of the job, Belichick forgot how to do what he already knew how.
All of last year’s named position coaches remain in place. Most infamously, two of them share a last name either with the head coach or general manager: Mike’s son Matt at quarterbacks coach, and Bill’s son Brian as defensive backs/safeties coach. Matt got a lot of heat last year, and deservedly so, because of how bad UNC’s quarterback play was and the fact that he has nearly no experience coaching the position in the pros, let alone in college. He still has the title this year, but there’s a new offensive coordinator in town (more on him later), and he’s one with a history of being very hands-on with his quarterbacks, so it’s a decent bet that Matt’s role on the staff has been diminished. UNC fans have seen this “use another coach to cover up for a bad hire’s weakness strategy” before; Mack Brown did it ahead of the 2023 season with Clyde Cristensen and Ted Monachino for Chip Lindsey and Tim Cross respectively to underwhelming-at-best-results. Meanwhile, Brian’s entire prior experience was with his dad in New England, but since his unit was pretty unremarkably okay, there’s less to say about him.
The other position coaches are Garrick McGee for wide receivers, Natrone Means for running backs, Will Friend for offensive line, Caleb Pickrell for tight ends (promoted from Offensive Assistant), Bob Diaco for defensive line, Jamie Collins for inside linebackers, Ty Nichols for outside linebackers, and Armond Hawkins for cornerbacks. Friend and Diaco are the two of the group with significant college experience; Friend has one of the best track records in the country and Diaco is a bit of a joke among college football fans but has led some good units. Hawkins found himself in some hot water last year for undefined recruiting violations, but that didn’t last too long.
Of course, there’s another Belichick on staff: Bill’s other son, Steve, the Tar Heels’ defensive coordinator. The popular theory at the time of the older Belichick’s hiring was that he’d be able to win some games and then hand the job to his son, who was coming off an impressive year with Washington where his defense ranked in the top 30 in FEI. Of course, that was going to necessitate Steve continuing his success in Chapel Hill, and that didn’t really happen. Now, I do think that talent deficit had more to do with the defense’s issues than Steve, and I think schematically he acquitted himself fine — getting the group to be a top-20 red zone defense was no small feat. But the results are the results, at the end of the day, especially because I’m not sure this defense is all that much more talented than that one. And all of that might be moot, because Steve is currently on indefinite medical leave, so it’s unclear when or if he’ll have the opportunity to actually coach this defense. Despite the acidic tone with which I’m writing all of this, I do wish him the best of health.
What’s Different
In pretty short order after the season ended last December, Bill fired his offensive coordinator, Freddie Kitchens, and his special teams coordinator, Mike Preifer. Kitchens, who by his own admission got the job just by showing up to work until Belichick, lacking other options, was forced to give it to him, led one of the worst offenses in UNC history, so that one makes sense. Preifer’s unit was overall pretty good, but had a few high-profile whiffs down the stretch of the season, including moments in all three in-state ACC games — a blocked field goal against Wake Forest, the aforementioned fake field goal against Duke, a fake punt against N.C. State. To me, that’s the kind of reactive move that a bad coach makes to cover their butt after a string of embarrassments rather than one made through a dispassionate look at the available information. That dichotomy is only more apparent based on their replacements: Belichick went out and got one of the best college offensive coordinators in the country, available or not, to replace Kitchens. To replace Preifer, he simply promoted an assistant. With one hire, he tried to solve a problem. With the other, he just made a change.
The new offensive coordinator is, of course, Bobby Petrino. Sordid past aside, he’s done at least a good job, if not a great one, at every college stop he’s made, including his multiple stints at Louisville and Arkansas where he’s succeeded in multiple ways. Petrino’s track record across multiple eras of football speaks to his understanding of the game — not limited to a single scheme or philosophy, just knowing how to get a roster in the right positions to succeed. Like Kitchens, he likes to run the ball and likes to run a lot of gap/power, but unlike Kitchens, he does it a lot more out of spread formations and using a lot more motion to create mismatches and numbers advantages. The one thing that’s a constant with Petrino is his mantra: “Feed The Studs.” He has always identified his best players and made sure they’re getting touches. With wide receivers, that probably means a big year for Jordan Shipp. With running backs, it might mean there’s a sight less random shuffling of the group’s pecking order than there was last year, and that Belichick has been famous for in the past. It bears repeating that while “running backs don’t matter” can be true in the NFL after the elites of the position are removed from the equation, it’s certainly not the case in college.
The new special teams coach is Billy Miller, who was hired last year as a special teams assistant. Miller held that position for prep powerhouse IMG Academy for 8 years before taking the head coaching spot there from 2022-24, and while he has essentially no college experience, that gives him more qualifications than most of his colleagues in Chapel Hill. As with a lot of this staff, there’s not much to glean about him beyond that. It’s worth noting that he hadn’t worked with Preifer before last year, so it’s not like he’s beholden to the same things the previous guy was doing.
Outlook
Bill Belichick really wants us to believe that this year is going to be different. Reading other media outlets’ coverage of this program, I see again and again that he’s supposedly learned from what went wrong last year and understands how to work within college football now. I just think it’s a tall ask to believe that everything that signaled a poorly-coached team last year was down to a coach who knew football and had to get familiar with the “college” part. I feel like asking me to buy that is asking me to ignore the football that actually happened last year and just remember the big picture, that the team was bad. Belichick has made one big change that’s virtually assured to be an upgrade, and that’s the move at offensive coordinator. Beyond that, everything is riding on Belichick’s own self-assessment and subsequent improvement, in other words, the hope that he’s right and I’m wrong about what held him back from being good at his job in 2025. Looking forward, his and Lombardi’s 2027 recruiting class ranks 36th in a class that’s already pretty well on its way to being completed (the ‘26 class ranked 17th on raw “points,” 27th in class average, and in the upper 20’s if you took the average of just the top 20 guys in the class); that’s not exactly the stuff of a rebuild that will keep getting better without inspiration on the field in the here and now.
Ultimately, either we get a version of Belichick that we haven’t seen in college football and that we arguably haven’t seen at all in close to a decade, or we get what recent history indicates. I’m not really sure there’s a median option — either UNC gets the GOAT they’ve been waiting for, or his staff remains one of college football’s most pathetic laughingstocks.
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