When Bill Belichick accepted the North Carolina job on Dec. 11, the winter transfer portal was already open and the early signing period had taken place the prior week. Not exactly ideal timing.
UNC has shown serious interest in improving its trenches and is expected to be active in that market during the upcoming spring transfer portal window, which opens on Wednesday. The bigger question is whether it will spend the hefty price tags that accompany starting-caliber offensive and defensive linemen available.
With viable offensive linemen commanding upwards of $500,000 to start — and that number easily reaches into seven figures now for top players given the demand far outstrips the supply — UNC hasn’t shown a willingness to go there, according to those familiar with their negotiating approach. For some of the most desired players, UNC has offered considerably less than other programs in the mix.
Perhaps that’s spending discipline or hoping for a Bill Belichick discount the way his friend Nick Saban got in Tuscaloosa, but it’s clear the UNC brain trust of Belichick and general manager Michael Lombardi isn’t interested in splashing around money the way, say, Texas Tech has in putting together the No. 1 transfer portal class, according to 247Sports. They are also very attuned to how money can impact a locker room and don’t want to disrupt that by wildly unequal pay disparities within position groups.
Inheriting a program that went 6-7 in 2024, Belichick had to put together a staff for his first go at running a college football program and assess the talent remaining on the roster during the winter window, while other programs quickly worked to gobble up the top talent available in college football’s version of free agency. Some of them even had the advantage of knowing who would enter the portal and where the player would be headed — something critics call “tampering” and defenders call “pre-portaling.”
With transfer portal recruiting, in particular, time is of the essence and any hesitancy can result in missing out on a player. It was different from the free agency that Belichick and his right-hand man, Lombardi, were familiar with from their many combined years in the NFL.
“We didn’t have a prior relationship with a lot of kids that entered the portal because we didn’t recruit them,” Lombardi told CBS Sports earlier this year. “Teams that recruited a kid that went into the portal, they had a relationship with him. He didn’t go to your school but now he may want to come back. We didn’t understand that as much.”
