Bill Belichick to North Carolina has ripple effects, so who are the winners & losers of his big move?

It sounded like a joke when the idea first started circulating. Bill Belichick? North Carolina? Really?

But a little more than a week after those two entities were first publicly linked, they stood together at the altar of an introductory news conference on Thursday and said their “I do’s.” Talk about a transfer portal!

There will be plenty to watch and analyze in the coming months and years of Belichick’s tenure as a Tar Heel, from how he handles recruiting and greedy NIL hunters to his relationship with boosters, his comfort working at a public college and the very different media landscape of college football . . . not to mention the actual coaching of 18- to 22-year-olds in the games.

The immediacy of this unlikely union, though, creates ripples throughout the football world that cannot be denied. Some undoubtedly are glad about it, others miffed.

Here, then, are just a handful of the winners and losers sprouting from Belichick’s stunning return to the sideline at this very unlikely time and in this very unlikely place:

WINNERS

Brian Daboll

If you are looking for tea leaves regarding what the Giants will do with their head coach after this dreadful season, Belichick’s move is a fairly big one.

The Maras and Tisches have relied on Belichick’s recommendations to make their hires over the years, so there can be little doubt that before he took the UNC job, Belichick at least sent feelers to East Rutherford to get a sense of what their future might be. If there was any chance of a reunion with the Giants this offseason, it’s hard to imagine Belichick taking another job.

Does this mean Daboll will be back in 2025? Not necessarily. John Mara has so far held true to his word regarding no in-season changes, but the offseason is a completely different terrain, and the more dysfunctional the Giants become in these last four games, the less likely it will be that Daboll returns. Belichick’s move does at least remove the specter of his availability that has been hovering over Daboll and the Giants since last January.

Andy Reid

This may seem like yet another reason for the Dolphins and their faithful to pop the champagne as Don Shula’s record for most overall wins as an NFL head coach becomes a little safer, but there is another threat to that mark looming. Big Red becomes the new odds-on favorite to surpass him.

Had Belichick returned to the NFL, he would have had a pretty good chance of eclipsing the record of 347 held by Shula (that’s 328 in the regular season and 19 in the postseason, by the way). Belichick, sitting at 333 (302 regular season, 31 postseason), needed only 15 dubs to eclipse that. Two mediocre seasons probably would have done it.

Now, though, Reid has a chance to blow past Belichick and Shula. He currently has 296 wins (270, 26) and is “only” 66 years old. In the last five full years, he’s averaged 15.4 wins a season, and that number could go up at the end of this season with Kansas City already 12-1. Assuming Kansas City — and, most importantly, quarterback Patrick Mahomes — maintain that ridiculous pace, and with the prospect of an 18-game regular season looming as well, Reid could be passing Shula a little more than three years from now.

Tom Brady

The coach and quarterback combo won six Super Bowl titles together, and when they divorced, everyone wanted to see who could win without the other. Brady takes that title now, too.

He went on to lead the Bucs to his seventh championship and carry them to the playoffs in each of his three seasons in Tampa. Belichick stayed with the Patriots and had one winning record, one playoff appearance and zero postseason wins in four years without Brady. He departed New England after the 2023 season with the franchise in a disarray that has carried over into this season.

Brady’s post-playing career hasn’t been as dominant as he was on the field. His broadcasting leaves plenty to be desired, his family dramas have been aired publicly, and the best thing he’s done on TV in the last few years was to sit there and get roasted for a Netflix special. He needed this win.

The Jets

What? How do the Jets figure in all of this? They even had their embarrassing 2000 news conference when they tried to hire Belichick as their head coach recycled on Thursday when UNC held its introductory event. And there was never a chance that Belichick was going to land in Florham Park and work for Woody Johnson. Why do they win?

Because the Jets managed to get rid of not just one but two of their harshest antagonists in the media in one move: Belichick and Mike Lombardi, who will be leaving the TV cameras and podcast microphones to become Belichick’s general manager in Chapel Hill. Their combined disdain for the Jets was palpable in every appearance they made.

Neither of them are likely to have their feelings about Gang Green change, but at least they won’t have direct access to the megaphones to keep sharing them and laughing at the Jets. 

LOSERS

Dabo Swinney

The undisputed King of ACC Football has a new challenger. For most of the past decade, the conference has run through Clemson, including this year when the Tigers fended off some challenges and won a somewhat unexpected title over SMU along with a playoff berth. It was their eighth title in 10 years.

Now, all of a sudden, there is a bigger name — with a better resume — standing across the sideline from Swinney on Saturdays and trying to recruit from the same pool of players the rest of the time.

Will Belichick turn the Tar Heels into instant contenders with an opportunity to dethrone Clemson? That’s a big ask for a program that hasn’t won a conference title since 1980, when a senior linebacker named Lawrence Taylor led the team with 16 sacks. Dick Crum was the head coach then. But at the very least, Swinney is no longer the biggest and baddest dog in the yard, a dynamic he and the rest of the ACC will have to get used to in a hurry.

Joe Judge, Matt Patricia, Josh McDaniels, et al

Any hope these folks had of getting back into the NFL when Belichick landed with a new team and potentially brought the band back together is all but over. These days Judge is a senior analyst at Ole Miss, Patricia is doing some low-profile media and McDaniels is unemployed. They’ve pretty much failed at every NFL opportunity they were given outside of Belichick’s watch, and it’s hard to envision any of them returning to the league without him doing the hiring. Heck, even Jerod Mayo, still the head coach of the Patriots, may have been counting on Belichick to hire him somewhere else if he gets canned by New England next month.

There is a chance that one, some or all of them will wind up in North Carolina with Belichick, but it’s not the same as being in the NFL. And if they do join Team Bill again, they’ll probably be stuck behind Stephen Belichick in any hierarchy.

Joe Breschi

Who is Joe Breschi? He’s the men’s lacrosse coach at North Carolina, who, up until now, ran his program with relative independence from the rest of the sports at the school. Now he’s got to be worried about the football coach poaching his players.

That’s more a wisecrack than a reality, of course, but Belichick certainly has a deep love for lacrosse and a track record of scouting players from that sport to play for him. Chris Hogan probably is the best example of that, a former Penn State lax star whom Belichick converted to an NFL wide receiver, and he has experimented with others.

So as Belichick starts to put together his team’s 2025 roster, lacrosse stalwarts such as Johnny and Tyler Schwarz (who also played football at Shoreham-Wading River) or Owen Duffy, who was the top high school player in the country at St. Anthony’s, could be catching his eye. Watch out, Breschi!

Bill Belichick

Belichick can spin this any way he wants: A return to his passion for teaching, a homecoming to where his father coached, an opportunity to develop talent at an earlier age, a chance to create a legacy, with his son Stephen expected to become North Carolina’s head coach-in-waiting. He even came armed with a cute picture of himself as a toddler in a UNC shirt and a story about his first words being “Beat Duke.”

The reality is that if an NFL team had wanted Belichick, he would have been working for that team now or soon. He had to be embarrassed about being shut out of the hiring cycle last year when he was booted from New England and no one wanted him, and his prospects of landing a job in the league this January appeared just as dim.

The Jets, Bears and Saints definitely will have head-coaching vacancies as they’ve already fired theirs and replaced them with interims. There could be other potential openings with the Giants, Jaguars, Cowboys and Raiders. Those could be appealing jobs for a variety of reasons.

Presuming Belichick, in some fashion, sent feelers to all of those organizations (OK, probably not the Jets) to gauge their interest but still wound up taking the job at North Carolina before he even had a chance to interview for any of them tells you all you need to know about what the NFL thinks of this six-time Super Bowl champ.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.