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Why David Andrews, Brian Hoyer aren’t sold on Bill Belichick coaching UNC
Two of Belichick's former players with the Patriots think the coach's style might have a rough transition to college.
Whether or not it happens, the very prospect of Bill Belichick potentially eschewing the NFL to coach at the University of North Carolina has set the football world on fire.
NFL analyst Ross Tucker, who spent a season with the Patriots in 2005, said Tuesday on WEEI that Belichick would be “the worst college coach I could ever imagine” based on his experience with the former coach’s penchant for negative reinforcement.
Tom Brady made a similar crack on Belichick on the FOX Sports set this weekend in a humorous yet incisive impression of his ex-coach’s brusque manner.
A few of Belichick’s other former players, Brian Hoyer and David Andrews, echoed those sentiments on “The Quick Snap” podcast.
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“ It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me for him,” Hoyer said of Belichick coaching in college.
For one thing, the six-time Super Bowl-winning coach is just 14 wins away from passing Don Shula for the most regular-season wins in history. Spending multiple years in college might complicate an NFL return for him down the line.
“We’re all prideful,” Andrews said of the wins record. “I’m sure that’s in the back of his mind. It would be in mine.”
But more than that, Hoyer and Andrews also said Belichick would have to adjust in two major ways: his daily schedule management and his relationship with players.
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Both noted the differences between time constraints for professional players versus college students, who have classes in addition to football responsibilities.
“ Some of those squad meetings with Bill in the morning were 50-60 minutes,” Andrews said.
“The amount of people who would run to the bathroom after those long meetings — by the time I was in my 14th year, if he had shifted to speaking to the defense, and I had to pee, I was like, I got to get up,” Hoyer said. “… It’d already be 8:30, and he hadn’t even gotten to special teams.”
“And you knew special teams were going to be a 20-minute talk sometimes,” Andrews added.
Suffice it to say Belichick won’t have time for hour-long morning meetings with the full team in college unless they start at 6 am. (Good luck getting college students up for that.)
Also, both Andrews and Hoyer, who each had free-agent negotiations with Belichick at different points in their careers, said his terse style might not translate well with young college athletes and their families.
“ During one of my free agent negotiations, he called me basically at like 9:30 at night and was like, ‘All right, well, we’re done here. This is all we’ve got.’ And I was like, ‘Thanks, Coach. Appreciate it,'” Andrews recalled. “Now I’ve been on the team six years, captain for four years, whatever it is, and it was like a 10-second phone call.”
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“ I remember talking to [former Patriots OC/current Boston College coach Bill O’Brien] about it. He’s like, ‘Look, I went from coaching Tom Brady to having to go to these homes and tell these 18-year-old kids how great they were. That was a very far cry,'” Hoyer said.
“So how does Bill go from that mentality where you’re basically rough negotiating with these players that are adults to now?”
If Hoyer, Andrews, and the host of skeptical former Patriots players are right about Belichick, we might never get a chance to find out. But if Belichick did take the UNC job, you can bet they’ll immediately become one of the most interesting college football programs in the country.
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