TJ Walker examines Bill Belichick's struggling start at UNC as proof that dominance in one field doesn't transfer to another. The NFL's hierarchy and discipline are nothing like college football's transfer portal and NIL chaos. Michael Jordan failed at baseball, Wayne Gretzky couldn't coach, yet UNC paid Belichick a massive contract anyway.
Bill Belichick and the Great man myth Bill Belichick's rough start at the University of North Carolina isn't just about football. It's about the myth that greatness is somehow universal as the athletics. David Ubin reports UNC was blown out 38 to 10 by Clemson, the latest embarrassment for one of history's most successful NFL coaches. But Belichick's struggles expose what I call the great man myth. The belief that mastery in one field is automatically predicts success in another field. And I'm sorry, professional football is a different field than college. It just is. History shows this again and again. Michael Jordan, greatest basketball player ever according to some hit just.202 in baseball. Not a very good baseball player. Wayne Gretzky, the great one great hockey player. It was an ordinary coach. Bob Dylan tried filmmaking and critics begged him to stop. Howard Hughes, aviation and Hollywood pioneer, nearly destroyed his fortune running TWA airlines. And Elon Musk can build rockets and cars. But running government or social media, that's another universe entirely. Belichick's NFL brilliance came from discipline and hierarchy. But college football now thrives on chaos, transfer portals, nil deals and social media stars. Adaptation, not reputation, wins. Now even legends can misread the playbook when the rules change. What's the real message here? It's time to face reality. Bill Belichick as a college football coach is a disaster. Just because you're a good NFL coach doesn't mean you are a good college coach. There's been failures before and there have been plenty of college coaches who were great, went to the NFL and they stunk. It is a different skill set. Let's dig a little bit deeper here and look at this now. Confession. Let me be totally transparent. You are, at least within the United States, you would have a very hard time finding somebody especially sorry if this sounds sexist, but it's true. You would have a very hard time finding a man in the United States who knows less about football than I do. It's just not a sport I really care about. I watch maybe one NFL game, the Super Bowl a year, and that's about it. So I come to you not as an expert on football. What I am trying to look at is a more universal truth of how we as a society receive messages. We think, oh, this person's really smart here. They got to be smart here. Henry Ford was great at automating the production system of cars, at creating the factory, the assembly, great. But if you're looking to him for a philosophy on religious tolerance, not the guy to go to if you don't know what I'm talking about. Check it out. So it's a different skill set. And unfortunately, we live in a world where once you have high name ID, you have fame in one area. It's easy to transport that into another area and have people just give you lots of money. I mean, Bill Belichick got a gigantic, gigantic contract. Enough money to pay for probably half the professor's salaries at U.N.C.L.E. a state institution. And he's losing. He's not just losing. He's losing big time. He's losing by 10, 20, 30 points. Some of these games, not even close. They've all been blowouts so far. So here's what I want you to think about. It's not that I don't ever want you to try new things. If you succeeded at one thing and you want to take time off and try something adjacent, that's okay. But if you're thinking of investing your money, if you're on the trustees trustee committee of a major university and you're thinking about taking all the cash the university has and just giving it to someone who's never coached a single college game, maybe you should think twice. And a lot of the folks at the University of North Carolina thought this was clever. It's like, oh, he's so famous that we'll sell more tickets. Well, they did sell tickets. That's part of the battle. But if you looked at the stands and the photos of the stands a little bit after halftime, everyone left. They were so embarrassed for their school. Bored and embarrassed about being trashed on the field, destroyed. That's not a great way of building camaraderie in a school building school spirit, getting people more excited, recruiting more people. So sometimes what seems like the quick temporary fix is not a fix at all. It's a warning to all of us. Just because you're good at one thing doesn't mean you're good at something else. And again, I have to stress try things. I don't begrudge Bill Belichick trying to get everyone to give me the money, I'll take it. I don't begrudge him. I do begrudge the unc, I guess, athletic director and the whole organization for just saying here, basically, take all of our money. If we have to shut down the entire English department, we'll just give you all the money you ever could dream of, even though you're already rich and come be our coach because you a famous coach for a whole different league. Professional football college football different beast entirely.
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