FILE - New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick twirls his whistle during an NFL football practice, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Bill Belichick had seemingly been waiting for the right opportunity to return to an NFL sideline. Instead, the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach is headed to the college ranks to take over at North Carolina.

The school announced it had reached a five-year deal with Belichick on Wednesday night, roughly a week after Belichick’s name surfaced as an unlikely candidate to replace the program’s winningest coach in Mack Brown. The deal requires approval by UNC trustees as well as the UNC public system’s governors; an introductory news conference has yet to be scheduled.

Moving on from the 73-year-old Brown to hire the 72-year-old Belichick means UNC is turning to a coach who has never worked at the college level, yet had incredible success in the NFL alongside quarterback Tom Brady throughout most of his 24-year tenure with the Patriots, which ended last season.

There’s also at least a small family tie to the UNC program for Belichick; his late father, Steve, was an assistant coach for the Tar Heels from 1953-55.

“I am excited for the opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill,” Belichick said in a statement. “I grew up around college football with my dad and treasured those times. I have always wanted to coach in college and now I look forward to building the football program in Chapel Hill.

He's arriving on campus at a time of rapid changes in college athletics, from free player movement through the transfer portal and athletes' ability to cash in on endorsements to the looming arrival of revenue sharing. Consider the Belichick hiring a novel approach by the school to rethinking how it will approach those challenges, led by someone known for success at the highest level of the sport.

“We know that college athletics is changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking,” UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “Bill Belichick is a football legend, and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina football can evolve, compete and win — today and in the future.”

Belichick holds 333 career regular-season and postseason wins in the NFL, trailing only Don Shula’s 347 for the NFL record, while his 31 playoff wins are the most in league history.

He's the second coach to win a Super Bowl and then later become a college head coach; Bill Walsh won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers and later went 17-17-1 at Stanford from 1992-94.

He had been linked to NFL jobs in the time since his departure from the Patriots, notably the Atlanta Falcons in January. That’s why word of Belichick’s conversations with UNC — first reported by Inside Carolina and confirmed by the AP last week — stirred such surprise as an unexpected and unconventional candidate.

But the two sides had been in discussions for several days working on terms before finally reaching an agreement to cap what once seemed an improbable outcome.

Belichick said Monday on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” that he’d had “a couple of good conversations” with UNC chancellor Lee Roberts and that he’d spent much of the past year taking a “longer look” at college football.

“If I was in a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” Belichick said Monday. “It would be a professional program: training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques that would transfer to the NFL.

“It would be an NFL program at a college level. And an education that would get the players ready for their career after football, whether that was the end of their college career or at the end of their pro career."

Belichick began his NFL coaching career as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts in 1975 and later worked as defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells with the New York Giants, winning two Super Bowls during that stint. He also spent five seasons as head coach of the Cleveland Browns in the first half of the 1990s.

He got his second shot as a head coach in 2000 with the Patriots. And in his second year, as Brady rose to stardom, Belichick won his first Super Bowl title as a head coach.

The Belichick-Brady duo went on to win the Super Bowl for the 2003, 2004, 2014, 2016 and 2018 seasons, and Belichick was The Associated Press NFL coach of the year three times.

Now he takes over a UNC program that is facing a familiar challenge of how to build a sustained winner. The program had reached elite levels in moments rather than eras, notably with Brown building UNC into top-10 national stats (1996, 1997) to end his first tenure in Chapel Hill before taking over at Texas or the Tar Heels cracking the top 10 of the AP Top 25 poll briefly in 2015 and 2020.

The peak of Brown's second tenure came with a nine-win season and trip to the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game in 2022 behind eventual No. 3 overall NFL draft pick Drake Maye, who was coincidentally drafted by the Patriots for their first post-Belichick year.

The school announced Nov. 26 that Brown wouldn’t return for a seventh season in his second stint in Chapel Hill, a firing that became effective after the program’s all-time wins leader coached his finale in the Nov. 30 loss to rival N.C. State.

Freddie Kitchens, himself a former Browns head coach, has been working as the interim coach as the Tar Heels prepare to face UConn in the Fenway Bowl on Dec. 28.

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