The lows exceed the highs of the Deion Sanders coaching era at Colorado and through one season of Bill Belichick’s tenure at North Carolina. Anything less than progress in the 2026 college football season could lead to their departures afterward.
Bill Belichick and Deion Sanders are college football’s two most famous coaches. Unfortunately for North Carolina and Colorado fans, the linkage between “celebrity coach” and “winning coach” remains unclear.
Colorado is coming off a 3-9 record in Sanders’ third season. A lot of people around college football were surprised Coach Prime returned to the Buffaloes last year after his son Shedeur Sanders and 2024 Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter moved on to the NFL in the spring.
Those same people are doubly surprised Sanders is back for a fourth season, having only put a good team on the field once in his first three tries.
Belichick’s 4-8 record in Chapel Hill last year matched Sanders’ performance in his debut season in Boulder. The season was memorable mainly for an opening blowout loss against TCU and a constant drip of stories about Belichick’s commitment level to the program and his relationship with a girlfriend who is about one-third his age.
What now, then, with Belichick 74 years old and Sanders turning 59 during fall camp?
Sanders’ tenure has been a tangible success in a few ways, at least. Colorado will always have 2024, when it was the center of the CFB universe for a while. Hunter’s Heisman also will always loom large in the program’s history. But the path to even sniffing Big 12 title contention again is unclear.
Meanwhile, North Carolina was enough of a disaster in Belichick’s first season that it’s fair to wonder if he might carve out a place for himself on lists of the most ill-conceived, ill-fated head coach hirings in the sport’s recent history.
People are not, in general, optimistic. Both teams have preseason win totals of 4.5 (in 12-game regular seasons) in betting markets. If either team finishes within a game of that number, a bleak situation will get bleaker. Does either program have a serious shot at not just beating expectations but sticking in a conference race for long enough to build some semblance of program momentum?
Let’s dive into it.
Two Coaches, Two Different Talent Problems
In his debut, one of Belichick’s many problems was a condensed timeline. He took the North Carolina job on Dec. 11, 2024, well after most of the dust had settled on the college coaching carousel and leaving a recruiting class to be slapped together from spare parts, with just three high school blue-chippers joining a class packed with three-star rolls of the dice.
In an effort to be good right away, Belichick and his general manager, Michael Lombardi, took a class of 41 transfers, headlined by South Alabama quarterback Gio Lopez. But it didn’t work out well – in general or for Lopez, in particular.
In 2026, UNC is acting more like a program interested in the long term. The Heels’ combined incoming class is ranked 22nd in the country, per 247Sports, and includes half as many transfers and twice as many four-star high schoolers as last year’s class. This is at least a little bit intriguing, even as it clashes in theory with Belichick only having two guaranteed years left on his five-year contract.
The notion of Belichick being at UNC long enough to develop a promising class of prep recruits until they’re productive sophomores, juniors and seniors feels fanciful, but maybe it could happen. If anything was eye-catching in UNC’s portal haul, it was Belichick loading up on tight end transfers from Texas, Ohio State and Colorado State. The Tar Heels might be angling to play big this fall: It’s worked for the six-time Super Bowl-winning coach before, of course, and it also fits with a current innovation in NFL offenses.
It’s enough to squint and see the development of a program. That’s more than what’s happening right now at Colorado, where Sanders’ combined portal/high school classes have dipped from rankings in the 20s the previous few years to 51st this year. Coach Prime still loves portal additions, with 40-plus this year, and is only vaguely gesturing at building through younger, cheaper high school prospects with longer eligibility horizons. He’s again saying goodbye to something like 60 outgoing portal players, and those happen to include the best player on the team (future NFL first-round offensive tackle Jordan Seaton, now at LSU) and an excellent cornerback (D.J. McKinney, now at Notre Dame).
In other words, Belichick and Sanders have different talent problems. Belichick realized he shouldn’t try to build his entire plane out of the portal but may or may not have the time or interest to see through a years-long buildup via prep recruiting. Sanders continues to not appear interested in any of that, meaning each Colorado season comes down to acing the portal period. Given what Colorado lost in that area over the winter, the odds don’t seem good that a better cavalry is arriving.
Colorado Has Quarterback Hope. Carolina Doesn’t.
The Tar Heels are poised to open up with Billy Edwards Jr., a third-school transfer by way of Maryland and Wisconsin, as the starting quarterback.
It may not go well: Edwards has played in 28 games in four seasons and topped out at “serviceable” while often being much worse than that. His 2025 season, the lone one at Wisconsin, was basically a washout: Edwards sprained his knee in the season opener, ineffective against Maryland a few weeks later, then didn’t play for the rest of the season.
In 2024, Edwards’ one year as a full-time starter at Maryland, he was 16th among Big Ten quarterbacks (minimum 50 attempts) in well-thrown ball rate, at 79.3%, according to Opta data. He was good at avoiding sacks, taking them on just 10.8% of his pressured dropbacks, and kept his pickable pass rate at a solid 2.7%.
But for a quarterback whose mobility has been a selling point, he wasn’t much of a runner. He averaged 3.8 yards on 41 designed carries and 2.5 yards on 28 scrambles. There were not many power conference programs that would have been happy going into fall camp with Edwards as the heir apparent.
Colorado’s QB situation is more exciting. Sanders didn’t think 2025 five-star recruit Julian Lewis was that good last year, or he wouldn’t have redshirted him while Liberty transfer Kaidon Salter struggled to get traction in front of him. Lewis played respectably in a road loss to West Virginia in November with a lot of yardage and no interceptions but also seven sacks on his ledger.
Now Lewis will get the keys to the car. He had a 1.14% pickable pass rate (second-best in the Big 12, minimum 50 throws) but was horrified by his 11.3% sack-per-dropback rate and 24.5% sack-per-pressure rate.
The defensive pressure situation on Lewis or any Buffaloes QB should not get better with Seaton now playing at LSU. Lewis will have to get better at feeling the rush and make more rapid decisions to offload the ball.
In 2024, Shedeur Sanders gave Colorado one of the country’s better QB stat lines despite being under constant duress. It can be done, but it’s just unusual, and Lewis may have to cosplay as a magician to live up to his billing at CU.
If You Had to Pick One Program …
I don’t expect the scenario to get a lot better for either Carolina or Colorado. My best guess is that when the 2026 season wraps up, Tar Heels fans will be more than ready for Belichick to move on with his life, and an enhanced percentage of Colorado fans will be ready to shake hands with Sanders and call it a tenure.
But if I were picking one of these two teams to demonstrate some progress this season, it would be, haltingly, the Buffaloes. That’s because of the enormous gap in QB potential between Lewis and whoever takes most of the snaps for UNC, most likely Edwards. If it happens, though, I wouldn’t expect it to change much of Colorado’s outlook going forward.
Assuming he’s still in office by then, Sanders will probably revert to a complete roster flip come January. It’s not clear why either of these coaches, or the schools that employ them, should be excited about continuing their partnerships for more than a few more months.
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Style Without Enough Substance: Progress Desperately Needed at UNC Under Belichick, Colorado Under Prime Opta Analyst.
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