Bill Belichick: College football "kind of came to me" this year

How did Bill Belichick end up in college football? As Belichick tells it, college football ended up in him.

"College kind of came to me this year," Belichick said during his introductory press conference at North Carolina. "I didn't necessarily go and seek it out. But I had many coaches, I mean, probably a couple of dozen coaches, talk to me and say, 'Hey, can we sit down and talk to you about these things?' The let's call it salary cap of pro football relative to college football, the headsets, the green dot, the two-minute warning, the tablets on the sideline. Those were all rules changes this year in college football that were either the same or similar to what we had in the NFL. And these coaches said, 'Hey, coach, can we just talk to you about how you did this, how you did that? What, you know, how did you use this? How did you handle the, you know — talking about the two-minute [warning], how did that . . . affect your strategy at the end of the half, the end of the game? How did you look at it? How did you break it down?'"

Belichick said that, as the conversations happened with coaches in the ACC, Big 10, SEC, and others, he became more aware of the issues in college football. Which basically turned the supposed effort to pick Belichick's brain into Belichick's brain being loaded up with information about college football.

It's an interesting way to conceal the possibility that Belichick wasn't simply making him available as a resource. That he was affirmatively looking for information from all of these coaches, knowing full well he might use it against them, directly in head-to-head games and less directly in recruiting.

His characterization might even be aimed at spinning his effort to learn the sausage recipe into a symbiotic gesture that resulted in both backs being scratched.

Regardless, if the college coaches who approached Belichick (or were approached by him) had any idea he was thinking about coaching at the college level, they would have at a minimum been more guarded about what they said to him. At most, they wouldn't have even talked to him.