What Did Bill Belichick Have to Say at ACC Kickoff?

Gio Lopez, Will Hardy, Thaddeus Dixon, and Jordan Shipp followed their head coach, Bill Belichick, to Charlotte, North Carolina for the 2025 ACC Kickoff. The Atlantic Coastal Conference held the even at the Hilton Charlotte Uptown, featuring tons of media representatives in an environment much different than years prior.

Why is that? Why was the environment much different? It's because of Coach Belichick's decision to make his way to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill following his one year away from the sidelines.

Following his statement, he continued to stand up at the podium and answer the following questions, also found on TheACC:

Q. Coming to this specific institution and developing these players off the field, why it was right for you to come to North Carolina and develop these Tar Heels?

"Developing players, that's really what coaching is, and that's what we do. We take great pride in that, myself and our staff, and players who want to be developed. A Carolina player is a player who wants to be a good football player, who wants to work hard, to wants to make a commitment towards improving on a regular basis, towards training and team execution on the field. So when we get those players, we see a lot of improvement, a lot of development.

And that's going back, whether it was at Cleveland, where Mike and I put together an offensive line where four of the five starters were free agents, or at New England where we had a number of low draft choices or high draft choices, I should say. I'd say Brady and Edelman, players like that, who turned out to be great players, as well as some of the other players are higher picks that developed like Gronkowski and so forth.

Development is a big part for us, and players that want to come in, work hard, be good players, learn, compete. Competition is what makes us all better. Again, the best competition for me, I learned the most from going against great offensive coaches like Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan, Mike Shanahan, Joe Gibbs, and all those guys that I competed against. That's what made me great as a coach, or made me work the hardest as a coach, was to compete against those people.

Same thing for the players. Internal competition, the competition we have daily on the field will get us most ready for the competition that we'll face on Saturdays or whenever the games are."

Q. I have a two-part roster building and general football question for you. Do you believe the evolution of the fullback position kind of being turned into an H-back role was more due to roster flexibility and player versatility, and with the cyclical nature of football, do you see that position being revitalized now that defenses are more finesse driven?

"Well, hopefully we won't be in the finesse driven category. We're certainly not shooting for that. But thanks for the question.

The fullback question is an interesting question. It really picked up a lot of momentum when Coach Coryell started with that and then Joe Gibbs brought it to Washington and ran a one-back offense with Riggins and those guys, all the backs that he had there, they kind of rotated them through, George Rogers, all those guys.

Then that became -- they caught on definitely throughout the NFL, and at the Giants we faced that twice a year. So pretty familiar with the way that one-back offense evolved, and now as offenses have gotten into more spread formations, where there's a lot of 11 personnel and almost all college defenses and pro defenses, for that matter, are nickel based, with maybe a six defensive back in passing situations, but most everybody is playing five defensive backs.

I think that reflects on the lack of a fullback, and even in 12 personnel where usually one of the tight ends is a receiving tight end.

How that trend will continue, I don't know. I'd say for us, we'll do what we feel like is best for the football team, like we always do, and just see how that plays out.

It's been an interesting evolution that's gone from everything being all two-back. I remember when I first started with the Colts, we went through all the defensive adjustments, that there was always one little box in the very bottom corner of the page that had a one-back set on it. Everything else was in two-backs, whether it was brown, blue, black, I, green.

Depending on where the backs were set there were different color codes for the formations, and there was one box for the one-backs, and now there's no two-back sets, so that's been an evolution.

Q. Talking to Dabo Swinney earlier, he said how much he's learned from you since you made this move to North Carolina. How has your relationship with him grown, as well as the other coaches in the ACC?

"Yeah, we're all learning from Dabo. That's very nice of him to say that, very complimentary. Dabo has been a friend for a long time. We've scouted his players from the NFL down. Some of the players that are here today, I actually thought, maybe we'll be drafting one of these guys, and now here we are going to be playing against them.

But Dabo has been great. I have so much respect for him and the Clemson program, what he's done, the way he runs it. It's high quality. Kids are high quality. He came up to New England, got probably the top player out of New England in the last probably decade, Christian Wilkins out of Springfield, Suffield Academy.

I think that says a lot for the program that he runs and what he's done for not only college football but all the student-athletes that he's coached there. They've gone on to represent him and the school very well.

Again, I have a ton of respect for Dabo and what he's done. Great opportunity to spend some time with him at the ACC coaches' meetings, and he's always been a really enjoyable guy to be around. I don't know if that'll be true on Saturday afternoon. Probably not. But at least in these meetings it is."

Q. One of the biggest differences between the pro game and college game is you're dealing with 18 to 23, 24 year olds as opposed to full-grown men with families and whatnot, and with an off-season that's seen a little bit of controversy, how have you ushered them through blocking the noise and keeping the main thing the main thing?

"Yeah, well, the great thing about working with the college players is just the growth and the development that we've seen, that I've seen with them. I saw a little bit of that last year when I was at Washington with Coach Fisch and Steve out there to see how much the players improved from the spring until the start of training camp.

This year, of course, we haven't started training camp yet, but through the course of the spring, the amount of improvement that our players made in those 15 days, most of which were in pads, was something you never saw in the NFL because we never could wear pads in the off-season.

So how much better the players got and their fundamentals, their footwork, their hand placement, leverage, tackling, so forth, all the physicality things that come with different positions, whether that's press release, jams, so forth. Their improvement was tremendous.

So I'd say on the college end, you're right, the players are a little bit younger and less skilled. Sometimes that's an advantage. There are fewer bad habits to break. But also, I'd say the players are much more receptive to the coaching. They haven't had as long with the way that they were doing it through a college career maybe, and through some pro years where they were starting to develop some habits that they were comfortable with and maybe were a little harder to change.

I'd say with our players, they've been very receptive to everything we've asked them to do. They've trained extremely hard, as I said. The personal achievements between their strength, their speed, their explosiveness, all the different body fat percentages, all the different things that we measure is in the high 90 percent range. There's only a couple guys that haven't had the improvement, but really, it's been pretty much the whole team.

That's been -- as a coach, it's fun. It's fun to see players get better, and then that gives them more momentum to keep working. I know we've given the players a couple weeks off in the training cycle from time to time, and in a lot of cases they come back, even a little bit further ahead of where they were when they left, which kind of indicates they continue to work hard in their training.

We're excited to see all that manifests itself out on the field when we actually start playing football, but I think we'll be ready to start when we get going next week."