Bill Belichick is Remaking North Carolina in His Own Image
Belichick is taking the Tar Heels national
North Carolina head coach Bill Belichick has never coached at the collegiate level in his 50 year career. His general manager Michael Lombardi has more collegiate experience, but that was as a recruiting coordinator at UNLV over 40 years ago. So it remains an open question how their program would go about locating and attracting high school talent. Although they’ve only been in Chapel Hill for about 100 days, we can take a look at how they’re approaching future classes to get a sense of their approach. Compared to the last three full classes of the Mack Brown era, the early steps of the Belichick administration are to look more nationally and give less relative focus to the southeast.
For the purposes of comparison we will assume that the last three full classes under Mack Brown represent a typical North Carolina recruiting strategy. The plurality of the talent they chase after coming from Georgia - Atlanta in particular - followed closely by the home state, Virginia, and Florida. Under Brown these were the sources of the high school pipeline: 70% of their offers to competitive recruits went to players in one of these four states. Also of note is that they only extended an offer to dubiously west coast player.
To compare the Belichick administration’s recruiting to Brown, we’ll look at classes which have most likely only been recruited by the new staff. We’ll do this by looking only at the 2027-29 classes, so recruits who are between high school sophomores and 8th graders. They are extremely young, and an offer at this point really just means they’re big and/or athletic for their age. But it gives us an indication of exactly where they’re trying to seek out talent. From this vantage point we can note three major departures:
They have not spent much time focusing on Atlanta whatsoever. Across these three classes UNC has three offers to Atlanta recruit, but only one (extremely large ‘27 IOL Bryson Hurt) was actually offered since Belichick became head coach. This is curious. They’ve clearly spent a lot of time in-state presumably trying to build connections with local high schools. Only good things can come from having a good relationship with your in-state high school coaches, and North Carolina has a bunch of talent anyways so sure why not. But it seems like they’ve spent very little time scouting out talent in the city which produces the most talent in America. They will not continue doing this, obviously, but I will be interested to see exactly when they hit the ground running there.
It’s impossible to exactly prove, but the data seems to suggest that Bill’s son and defensive coordinator Steve, formerly the DC at Washington, is playing a significant role in North Carolina’s scouting process. The Tar Heels have offered 7 players out west. One is Legarrette Blount’s son who doesn’t seem to have played varsity snaps yet. Another is Eric McFarland, an IMG wide receiver from Las Vegas. Neither of these are particularly surprising for this staff or indicate much of anything. But the remaining five have Steve’s fingerprints all over them. One of them (Los Angeles ATH Skylar Robinson) was offered after his older brother Jordan transferred to North Carolina to follow Steve. The remaining four are all defensive backs, Steve’s primary position, who were either already offered by Washington by the time Steve came over or were presumably scouted by him. I believe this would suggest that Steve is taking a particularly prominent role in the program’s scouting process.
In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, a Bill Belichick team seems to be intentionally scouting out talent in the Northeast. Excluding an IMG recruit originally from western Pennsylvania (CB Larry Moon), the Tar Heels have offered 6 players from the area encompassing New England as well as Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Over the last three complete Mack Brown classes UNC only offered 3 competitive recruits from the region. Considering everything we know about Bill Belichick this isn’t surprising, but it is somewhat amusing that in the classes that have been all his he’s offered as many kids from Philadelphia and New York as Miami, all of which are barely less than Atlanta.
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