Ultimately, Bill Belichick took the bird in the hand

It's easy for Bill Belichick to say he believes NFL teams would have been interested in him during the upcoming hiring cycle. But the reality is that he didn't believe any such interest would have resulted in a job he deemed to be suitable, so he went with a college job.

There's a sense in some league circles that Belichick was looking not just for potential interest but an unofficial commitment, before the end of the current season. That would have violated the spirit if not the letter of the Rooney Rule; a team would have had an unofficial understanding with Belichick while embarking on a box-checking search before inevitably interviewing Belichick and officially hiring him.

While such ruses aren't unprecedented (it was widely believed that Washington did just that when hiring Mike Shanahan in 2010), most teams aren't willing to circumvent the rules. No one was willing to do it for Belichick.

Perhaps more accurately, no one whom Belichick deemed worthy of his services was willing to do it. Before Belichick took the job, Mike Lombardi (who per the Wall Street Journal made the first contact to North Carolina on behalf of Belichick) openly asked as to the NFL, "Where are the great jobs?" Along the way, Lombardi took a not-so-subtle shot at the Jaguars and chief football strategy officer Tony Khan, saying “there’s sons of owners that run the analytical department.”

Whether their message is that no available job is worthy of Belichick or that no owner is smart enough to give Belichick the keys (or some of both), the unmistakable vibe coming from Camp Belichick is that there's something wrong with the owners, not with him.

Last year, he went 0-for-7 as to non-Patriots vacancies, getting only one interview. This year, no team was linked to him — beyond Saturday's leak from Belichick and/or Lombardi that Belichick contacted the Jets.

Who in the NFL would have promised Belichick a job, before conducting a full search? Yes, he's a great game-day coach, perhaps one of the greatest of all time. But as one NFL decision-maker recently noted, Belichick is 70-93 in games played without Tom Brady.

Basically, Belichick is turning the tables on the line coined by George Costanza: It's not me, it's you.

Taking another page from the Costanza playbook, Belichick broke up with the NFL before the NFL could break up with him.

That said, it's not over. Regardless of what Belichick says, the negotiated UNC buyout that plummets from $10 million to $1 million on June 1, 2025 means that the NFL easily can come calling in the 2026 hiring cycle.

And if someone really wanted him in 2025, they could still call. The pre-June 1 buyout is peanuts for an NFL team, especially with no salary cap for coaching expenditures.

While it's highly unlikely that Belichick would leave Chapel Hill before even coaching a single spring practice, it's just a matter of time before Belichick or Lombardi leak to someone that one of the teams with a vacancy in the upcoming hiring cycle called Belichick to see whether he wanted to interview for the job.