The University of North Carolina has agreed to pay new football coach Bill Belichick $10 million a year, according to a term sheet the university released Thursday afternoon.
While the agreement is for five years, only the first three years’ pay is guaranteed in case Belichick is fired without cause.
The annual pay figure is double what North Carolina had been paying recently fired coach Mack Brown. It would make Belichick the sixth-highest paid college football coach at a public school for the 2025 football season, according to the USA TODAY Sports annual salaries database and contracts obtained through open-records requests.
Among coaches at public schools, Belichick will trail Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian, Florida State’s Mike Norvell and Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer. Southern California’s Lincoln Riley was paid $10,043,418 during the 2022 calendar year, according to the university’s most recently available tax records – the only documents available because USC is a private school.
Belichick’s deal also provides him with a $100,000 expense annual expense account and the possibility of getting $3.5 million a year in bonuses. Among the bonuses, a total of $250,000 looks to be routinely attainable: $150,000 for the team playing in a non-CFP bowl game, which generally requires a record of at least 6-6 (UNC’s record this season), and $100,000 for the team having a single-year NCAA Academic Progress Rate figure of 950 to 969 (the team has exceeded 950 in each of the past three years).
In addition, the term sheet says North Carolina will provide:
–$10 million as an ‘assistant coach salary pool.’ (This season, UNC is paying nearly $7.4 to its 10 primary assistants, according to information obtained from the school by USA TODAY Sports. The NCAA Division I Council this past summer eliminated its 10-person limit on the number on-field assistant coaches at schools other than service academies.)
–$1 million for strength and conditioning staff.
–$5.3 million for support staff, including funding for a new general manager position with pay ‘not to exceed $1.5 million.’ During a news conference Thursday, Belichick said that role will be taken by Mike Lombardi, a former NFL executive. Alabama GM Courtney Morgan is due to make $825,000 next season.
–$13 million as what the term sheet called ‘revenue sharing.” This is presumably a figure that represents the total amount of money the university plans to pay to football players as consideration for the use of their name, image and likeness if a federal judge grants final approval in April to the proposed settlement of antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences.
So far, North Carolina is the first school to publicly disclose as part of a coach’s employment terms the amount it intends to provide football players for their NIL rights.
Under the settement’s terms, schools are expected to be allowed to pay their athletes, across all sports, $20 million to $23 million for their NIL rights.
(This story was updated with new information.)
