Monday Night Kickoff, Quick Turnaround Among Opening Twists for UNC

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — While North Carolina’s Bill Belichick is coaching a football team on the college level for the first time in his career, more than 500 games across 29 years as a head man in the NFL certainly don’t render him a rookie in navigating the complexities and oddities of a season schedule.

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The Tar Heels’ highly anticipated Sept. 1 season opener against TCU, raising the curtain on Belichick’s spotlighted debut in prime time, also marks the first Monday night regular-season game in UNC’s football history as an institution, which reaches through more than a century to 1888.

Then, five days after that season-opening spectacle, the Tar Heels are tasked with playing a Sept. 6 game at Charlotte, their first road assignment of the 2025 campaign arriving in particularly short order. And that night at Richardson Stadium is being billed as perhaps Charlotte’s most significant home game since the 49ers’ football program was reborn in 2013.

“It’ll be similar to what we had in the NFL, where we had Sunday and Thursday games,” Belichick said last week. “Every team in the NFL had a Thursday game. That goes all the way back to some Thanksgiving games, really at the beginning of my career. So that Sunday to Thursday is a quick turnaround. It only happens one time, so that’ll be a little bit different from all the rest of the weeks. We’ll try to make the most of that opportunity in compliance with our time constraints and rules and travel and so forth.

“But it is what it is. We’ve talked about it, we’ve planned for it. But we’re not worried about it right now. We’ll deal with that when we get to it. The Monday night game, since it’s the opening game, we just pretend like it’s a Saturday game and back everything back on a daily basis to make Monday look like Saturday. It’ll be the next short week that’ll have the bigger adjustment.”

Out of the gate here to start the new season, with just four days on the calendar between Carolina’s first two games, the Tar Heels will be confronted with some structural challenges that align with Belichick’s enduring reputation as a process-driven worker and planner.

UNC’s Monday night kickoff provides a taste for the flavor of the rest of the 2025 menu. These aren’t all Saturday afternoon games every week. The Tar Heels’ schedule includes a pair of Friday night road dates, on the West Coast at California (Oct. 17), and in the dome at Syracuse (Oct. 31).

TCU collected nine victories last season, and has gone is 27-13 in three seasons under coach Sonny Dykes. The Horned Frogs capped 2022 by advancing to the College Football Playoff national championship game. Charlotte, under new coach Tim Albin, has named UNC transfer Conner Harrell its starting quarterback.

“Are the players as strong or as fast as they are when they’re 23, 24, 26 years old? Probably not,” Belichick said last week, when asked about building a college program for the first time in his long coaching career. “But I would say the rate of improvement is a lot higher here. We’ve seen a lot more growth and improvement than what we would in the NFL, in terms of percentages and the raw numbers (with strength and conditioning). Maybe not quite to the heights, but the rate of improvement and the growth percentage-wise has been much greater than what we ever saw in the NFL.

“So you know that you’re helping the players improve, and they see themselves improving. And generally speaking, they want to work harder so they can see more of it. So that’s been very refreshing and, I would say, satisfying. We’ll see what we do on the field. But we’re coming along there, too, and we’ll see how it turns out.”