Mike Priefer Carries Special Perspective into UNC’s Military Appreciation Game

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — As part of North Carolina’s military appreciation game on Saturday against Stanford, Mike Priefer joined the Carolina Football Live radio show on Thursday night to recount his journey from serving in the Navy to working as special teams coordinator for the Tar Heels under Bill Belichick.

Priefer graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1989, where he played quarterback and receiver for the Midshipmen. He served as a naval officer until 1994, piloting helicopters abroad, including tours in Somalia, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.

Then, Preifer returned to the Naval Academy to work as a flight instructor before “backdooring” his way into coaching as a graduate assistant for the football program. Three years later, he left Navy to pursue a full-time career in coaching as the special teams coordinator at Youngstown State. From there, Priefer eventually worked his way into the NFL, where he spent 20 years across stops with the Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs, Denver Broncos, Minnesota Vikings and Cleveland Browns.

“I really enjoyed the flying part, I enjoyed the camaraderie,” Priefer said on the radio show. “I was a division officer, so I got to lead young men when I was a young man myself. So there’s a lot of great experiences that helped me prepare for coaching football, I believe.”

In January, Priefer came out of retirement to join Belichick’s new coaching staff at UNC, another decision that required his wife’s support for after all these years.

“My wife, Debbie, is incredible because she was a Navy wife, and now she’s a coach’s wife,” Priefer said, setting up a joke. “So she’s going straight to heaven.”

One of the questions radio show host Jones Angell asked Priefer during his segment was how much similarity there is between football and serving in the military. Although the two certainly are distinctly different, Priefer did note parallels in weekly game preparation to that of planning military operations.

“I compare meetings and coaching young men in football to our pre-flight briefs a little bit,” Preifer said. “You know, go over our safety brief, or we used to fly Navy Seals around. We did search and rescue, anti-submarine warfare, and then we worked with the Seals. Anytime we worked with the Seals, man, those guys, they were locked in. So it was fun. So when our guys are locked in, it kind of compares me to that.”

Saturday’s game against Stanford, which also is UNC’s homecoming, holds special meaning for Malcom Ziglar, too. The sophomore defensive back has a personal connection to the Tar Heels’ annual military appreciation game. In 2013, his father, Sharndell Ziglar, returned from deployment to surprise Malcom, then 7 years old, and his family at Kenan Stadium.

Now, almost 12 years later to the day, Malcolm Ziglar will honor his father, who served 20 years in the Navy, by wearing his dad’s No. 34 high school jersey against Stanford.