Can a Legendary Coach Transform U.N.C. Football?

I didnt come here to leave, Bill Belichick said, after taking the head-coaching job with the University of North Carolinas football program.

But what exactly is he doing there? Paige Williams went to Chapel Hill to figure it out.

Plus: Will the MAHA moms turn on MAGA ? Eric Adamss kettle-cooked administration How we tracked Trumps Presidential profit Illustration by Madison Ketcham Ian Crouch Newsletter editor Bill Belichicks return to coaching was always going to be a big story.

He has the second most wins as a head coach in N.F.L history, and led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowls in twenty-four seasons, before retiring, in 2024.

But his new job was taking him down a notch, to the University of North Carolina, home to a middle-of-the-pack program that had never won a national title.

What was the plan? Would his genius fit the college game? And how would the famously gruff and businesslike Belichick work with nineteen-year-olds? And then, this spring, those questions seemed a little quaint.

Suddenly, Jordon Hudson, Belichicks twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, was dominating the conversation across the country.

She was appearing by Belichicks side during spring training and being included on the coachs e-mail correspondence.

How was that playing, down in Carolina? Turns out, much the same.

Everywhere I went in Chapel Hill, Paige Williams writes in this weeks issue , people wanted to talk about the girlfriend, or, as one woman, a highly educated medical professional, put it, that Jordon person.

In her reporting, Williams explores Belichicks odd late-life transformation from aloof football wizard to TV pitchman, Instagram main character, and tabloid fixture.

And, in Chapel Hill, she finds a school, and the town it defines, muddling through the financial and moral complexities of modern college sports.

Some people are desperate for the football team to start winning.

Others want it to lose , and allow U.N.C.

to remain, first and foremost, a basketball school.

In any case, the stakes are high.

As one local sportswriter tells Williams, Hiring Bill Belichick is either one of the greatest hires that any school has ever made or its the biggest embarrassment that U.N.C.

will ever have.

Read or listen to the story How Bad Is It? Hurricane Erin is booming up the East Coast for the next several daysits a massive and powerful storm, with Category 2 winds reaching a hundred miles from its center.

Meteorologists have described it as freakishly large.

How bad is it? Not as bad as it could be, because a ridge of high pressure is keeping the storm out to sea," Bill McKibben, a New Yorker contributing writer, told us over e-mail.

But it could nonetheless cause some serious erosion along the coastlineone buoy near the storms center was reporting forty-foot waves yesterday.

The worst damage may well be sustained along the barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina.

Heavy surf and rip currents have been reported along the Eastern Seaboard all week in advance of the storm; there were at least seventy water rescues in the Wilmington area of North Carolina, on Monday alone.

So stay out of the waterand keep an eye on the next two tropical disturbances that are now emerging off the coast of Africa, and beginning to head toward North America.

Were in the heart of hurricane season for the next six or seven weeks.

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P.S.

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