Luke DeCock: Bill Belichick ready to cut sleeves off an Alexander Julian blazer as UNC football coach

RALEIGH, N.C. — Bill Belichick, cutting the sleeves off an Alexander Julian plaid blazer.

Bill Belichick, responding to boosters’ grinning back-slaps with a scowl and, “We’re on to Georgia Tech.”

Bill Belichick, trying on Mack Brown’s old sideline puffy coat for size.

Bill Belichick, being asked to shake the hand of a human dressed as a toaster pastry.

Bill Belichick, adding the entire lacrosse team to the football roster to play special teams.

Can you imagine?

JONES ANGELL: “Welcome back everyone to Bill Belichick Live. Say, Bill, what’s your favorite appetizer here at Top of the Hill?”

BELICHICK: “Yeah, I’m not going to discuss that.”

North Carolina will miss out on all of that wonderful stuff if it doesn’t lock down a deal with Belichick to replace Brown as football coach, something that seemed imminent over the weekend but continues to dangle in the breeze.

North Carolina should be so lucky as to have it fall apart. This already has disaster written all over it, from the too-many-cooks hiring process to the transparent competing leaks from each camp: Belichick to NFL insiders, the trustees and boosters to political reporters. This circus has a lot of clowns and no tent.

Just when you think things couldn’t possibly get any more absurd at North Carolina than Brown burning a career’s worth of bridges in Chapel Hill by insisting he would be back next season only to be informed the next day he would not, here comes an NFL legend who couldn’t land an NFL job last cycle, with absolutely no NCAA experience in that lengthy career, as the top candidate to replace him.

Imagine the kind of privileged bubble you’d have to live in to be able to convince yourself that, after firing a genial 73-year-old coach who seemed to be losing his grasp on the rapidly changing world of college football, a surly 72-year-old with little or no grasp on college football is the right guy to replace him.

Why not dig up Knute Rockne’s corpse and drag it around, like Weekend at Bernie’s?

This is such a bad idea that even if it were to happen and somehow work out, it would still be an objectively bad idea even with 20-20 hindsight. Even if no one else wants the job, whether for football reasons or having to submit TPS reports to eight different bosses, this is an absurd place to land.

North Carolina is willing to settle for someone who counts as family because his dad was a Tar Heels assistant coach for three years some 70 years ago, who has spent one fall observing his son as an assistant coach at Washington and is therefore an expert on the college game despite actually never coaching in it, whose NFL dynasty fizzled as soon as Tom Brady tapped out, whose coaching tree has had little success. (Two branches of it actually sprouted in the ACC: Al Groh and Bill O’Brien).

And forget about UNC for a second: With all the nonsense that comes along with being a college head coach, it’s fair to wonder whether Belichick has fully thought this through, either.

Two words: Mayo bath.

What’s in this for him? If he wants to prove his late decline in New England wasn’t a fluke, the NFL is the place to do that. Beating Charlotte doesn’t count toward breaking Don Shula’s record. Beating the Panthers does.

Brown may have been out of coaching for a little while when he returned to North Carolina, but he at least had won something at the NCAA level, knew the school inside and out and was (and remains) as avuncular as Belichick is gruff.

Once again, the folks in power at North Carolina fell in love with a big-name trophy coach, but Belichick’s name only means anything to people like them. The oldest recruits in this cycle were 12 years old when Belichick last won anything. These kids don’t even know who he is, other than maybe the guy whose dog was apparently drafting for him during covid.

In Belichick’s defense, he does know the game of football as well as anyone on the planet and wouldn’t take the job without the financial backing to buy a decent team — no doubt at the continued expense of funds for basketball, which just lost out on the nation’s top recruit to BYU of all places — and if he’s got any tricks left up his absent sleeves, he might be able to find inefficiencies in recruiting, the transfer portal and on the field that college coaches have heretofore missed. It’s not like there are any NCAA rules left to break.

But that’s a lot of maybes, and there are fundamental aspects of the college game — like sucking up to high-school coaches, making nice with the faculty and getting players out of the film room to go to class — that would be entirely foreign to Belichick.

Whereas an up-and-coming college coach might have been able to build on the foundation Brown left behind — Jeff Monken is still out there, and wouldn’t it be something if UNC eventually blundered into what might be the best possible hire — this feels like it would be a ground-up rebuild of the entire operation. If Belichick really did submit a 400-page blueprint, and nothing’s ever gone wrong with a lengthy manifesto from a guy known for wearing a hoodie, it certainly suggests so.

There are only two reasons someone like Belichick wants a job like this: He’s running away from something, or he’s got no place else to go. Unlike Norman Dale at Hickory High, there’s no Jimmy Chitwood waiting in the wings to save him. If this falls through, both sides should be relieved, not aggrieved.