Major Head Coach Emerges as Early Name to Watch in College Football Hot Seat Talk

When you hire an eight-time Super Bowl champion who is considered the greatest coach in NFL history to run your college football program, he better deliver.

Bill Belichick didn’t in his first season at the helm in North Carolina.

The hoodie’s team got kicked in the teeth in his first game in front of a national audience, and then stumbled to a 4-8 record, all while battling an endless parade of unwelcome headlines around his girlfriend before the season even started.

No hire in college football was more intensely hyped than when Belichick took his first-ever NCAA gig, and none blew up in everyone’s face quite so badly.

In all, it was a forgettable debut that now has one of football’s great strategists reduced to being included on early lists for who could get fired next season.

And indeed, Belichick was noted as one of five head coaches in college football who will enter the 2026 season on the proverbial hot seat, according to a list compiled by USA Today’s Blake Toppermeyer.

“North Carolina hired Belichick to a five-year deal, but it left an escape hatch in the contract,” Toppermeyer said.

“He’d be owed about $10 million if fired after this season. That’s relatively small potatoes in an otherwise exorbitant buyout landscape.”

Belichick and North Carolina got the ESPN treatment in the first week of the 2025 season, put in a Monday night primetime slot under the lights.

Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor were even in attendance to watch arguably football’s most-accomplished defensive mind take over at their alma mater. For the first time maybe ever, North Carolina was seen to be a focus of the college football universe.

Instead, what they got was a stadium that started emptying out before halftime in what became a humiliating 48-14 shellacking against TCU.

The only team with a winning record the Tar Heels would beat? That was FCS visitor Richmond, the only time Belichick’s team scored over 40 points. Or over 30 points.

North Carolina went on to rank just 120th among 136 FBS teams in the country in scoring, averaging just over 19 points per game, and placed 129th in total offense.

That wasn’t, by a long stretch, what was expected when pairing the NFL’s second-winningest all-time head coach with college football’s ninth most-expensive contract.

Especially when his general manager, Michael Lombardi, gave fans the impression that the Tar Heels would be a winner right out of the gate.

It wasn’t only the losses that piled up, but the blowouts and the frankly uninspired games his players played.

There was a late-season surge that made things feel a little better, as Carolina beat Syracuse and Stanford and played close against Cal and a good Virginia team.

And in the early offseason, Belichick was still able to sign a recruiting class that ranks among the top 20 in the country, according to 247Sports.

So while Bill Belichick may have put himself on the hot seat, there’s still room to nudge himself off it by this time next year.

(USA Today)

More college football from SI: Top 25 Rankings | Schedule | Teams

Follow College Football HQ: Bookmark | Rankings | Picks