How Long Will Bill Belichick Last at North Carolina?

Ever since Bill Belichick, that aging football Caesar, arrived at the University of North Carolina roughly two years ago with his eight Super Bowl rings, the knives have been out.

He is one of the greatest coaches in NFL history, but his hiring was controversial: Despite no experience leading a college team, he was given a five-year, $50 million contract—$30 million of it guaranteed—to vitalize a dowdy old southern program and lift it to championship level.

From the beginning, he has been fighting a two-front battle: one on the field, and another against internal opponents, a contingent of powerful Carolina traditionalists who never wanted him there, resent his outsize presence, and wish UNC to remain a quaint, basketball-first school.

“It is an internal civil war,” John Preyer, the former chair of UNC’s board of trustees, who helped hire Belichick, told me.

For several weeks now, Belichick’s program has been the subject of a messy, reputation-threatening internal investigation, even as his team shows promising signs in early competition.

On August 5, UNC announced that it had hired outside attorneys to help with an evaluation of a personnel complaint against Belichick’s general manager, Michael Lombardi.

That has since grown into a sprawling, open-ended probe of Belichick’s entire office culture, with unsavory lines of questioning.

One person interviewed by the lawyers who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation told me they were asked whether they thought anyone drank on the job.

The person said they were also asked about staffers’ sexual relationships, and about possible drug use by Belichick’s son Steve, who serves as his defensive coordinator but is currently on indefinite medical leave for unstated reasons. (I was not able to reach Steve Belichick for comment.) His father said at a press conference last week, “I love all my kids but I’m not going to comment on a medical situation.” [ Read: The quiet desperation of Tom Brady ] Lombardi, whose attorney has denied that his client committed any wrongdoing, resigned on September 3, but the university announced that the investigation would continue anyway.

What the school did not announce was that two of the attorneys engaged by the university to investigate Belichick’s program, Nate Huff and McNair Nichols, are the subjects of whistleblower complaints over a separate investigation into the university’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL).