UNC Picked 8th in ACC Poll for Bill Belichick’s Debut Season

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The anticipatory intrigue only is building as North Carolina’s first season under coach Bill Belichick approaches, not that any college football forecasters actually know what to fully expect out of the transformed Tar Heels, who are navigating a time of vast change and turnover.

Transfer cornerback Thad Dixon, one of the many new arrivals, offered something of his own prediction from a wide-angled view recently, while reminding those in his audience of the Belichick standard that’s in place with UNC preparing for the start of training camp.

“You can expect a tough, smart, dependable team,” Dixon said last week at the ACC Kickoff event. “A team that communicates a lot. A team that’s well put together, well-driven. A team with a chip on their shoulder. Honestly, everybody’s got something to prove. Everybody is trying to get somewhere. That’s what you can expect out of us.”

Now, around the ACC, there’s another set of criteria from which to measure these new-look Tar Heels and their progress, in this 2025 season wrapped in originality and fascination.

UNC checked in eighth in the league’s predicted order of finish on Wednesday afternoon, landing among the middle of the pack in the 17-team football conference. Reigning champion Clemson again was selected as the ACC’s preseason favorite. Last season, coach Dabo Swinney, quarterback Cade Klubnik and the Tigers defeated regular-season champion SMU at the final horn in the league championship game, and captured their eighth conference title in 10 years.

Since the summer of 2011, only Clemson and Florida State have been picked to claim the ACC football crown. Wednesday’s voting results marked 10 such times now for Clemson as the preseason favorite, along with five times for the Seminoles. And since 2013, Clemson has been the ACC’s No. 1 preseason choice every year except 2014, 2017 and 2024.

Clemson (with 167 first-place votes) ran away and outdistanced second-place Miami (seven first-place votes) at the top of Wednesday’s predicted order of finish for the new 2025 season. Clemson piled up a fraction more than 91 percent of the first-place voting from the panel of 183 media members, who picked the preseason poll.

From its position in eighth, UNC also is looking up at SMU (selected third), Georgia Tech (fourth), Louisville (fifth), Duke (sixth) and Florida State (seventh). Pittsburgh, NC State, Virginia Tech, Syracuse, Boston College, Virginia, California, Wake Forest, and Stanford followed the Tar Heels in spots nine through 17, respectively, and rounded out the bottom half of the preseason poll.

Carolina opens ACC league play against Clemson in early October. Clemson enters the 2025 season featuring the highest returning rate of production (80 percent) nationally among the 136 teams on the FBS level, per data compiled by ESPN. Meanwhile, UNC returns 51 percent of its production from last season, tied with Cal and ahead of only Syracuse (46 percent) at the bottom of the ACC in that category. The Tar Heels have experienced a free-agency wave of 78 transfers coming and going both ways — an even 39 arrivals and 39 departures over the course of the portal’s winter and spring cycles.

“There’s going to be a lot of new this year,” veteran UNC defensive back Will Hardy said last week. “I’m excited for the new change, the new spark, the new energy that this season is bringing to the team. To the players on the team that stayed, but also just to the whole fan base and the community of Chapel Hill. I think everyone is looking forward to it. I’m no different. I know all the players on the team that were here last year are excited for this new change. When we got the news that Coach Belichick was going to be our new coach, we were all pumped for it. Shocked at first, but ready to get to work. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.”

After the Clemson matchup, the rest of UNC’s conference schedule includes games Oct. 17 at Cal, Oct. 25 against Virginia, Oct. 31 at Syracuse, Nov. 8 against Stanford, Nov. 15 at Wake Forest, Nov. 22 against Duke, and Nov. 29 at NC State.

Not that the 73-year-old Belichick, he of the six Super Bowl rings and 333 career victories as a head coach in the NFL, has sounded particularly concerned about anything beyond the parameters of training camp, when the Tar Heels will be tasked with stacking one good day after another. Carolina is days away from embarking on its first preseason camp under Belichick. Practices begin on Saturday (Aug. 2), as the work starts anew ahead of the 2025 season opener on Sept. 1 against visiting TCU.

“Overall, I feel like I’m underrated, of course,” new UNC quarterback Gio Lopez said last week, when asked if he perhaps has been undervalued as a transfer portal addition. “But I feel like every player should feel underrated. You should never feel like you’ve already earned your role. You should keep on wanting to get better. And I feel like the UNC team as a whole feels underrated. We want to prove ourselves.”

Carolina compiled a 44-33 record (27-21 mark in the ACC) across the last six seasons under former coach Mack Brown, who’s eight months older than Belichick. And the Tar Heels were cast as an expected ACC contender at times in summers of the past during Brown’s second stint in charge of the program.

After claiming the 2022 Coastal Division title and reaching the league championship game, the Tar Heels were picked third in the ACC’s 2023 predicted order of finish (behind Clemson and FSU). They were voted as the overwhelming preseason favorite to win the Coastal Division in 2021 (and tabbed to finish second overall as the league’s runner-up to Clemson). And they were chosen third in the 2020 preseason poll, behind Clemson and Notre Dame (when the Fighting Irish were granted asylum by the ACC for the pandemic season). The conference scrapped the divisional format in 2020, before doing away with it altogether prior to the 2023 season.

Since starting 6-0 in ACC league play in 2022, Drake Maye’s debut season at quarterback, UNC has put together a record of just 7-11 in conference games. The Tar Heels went 4-4 in the ACC and tied for sixth place in 2023, before finishing 3-5 and tying for 10th place in the expanded 17-team league last season.

“We have a long way to go,” Belichick said last week. “We’ve got a lot of new players, so we’ll see what happens when we get out there and start. I’m excited to see them play. They’ve worked hard and they’re in good condition. And I think they’re excited and they’re ready to go. So we’ll see where it takes us. … I feel like our team is going to be ready to start practice. We’ve obviously got a long way to go with 70 new players — 40 transfers, 30 freshmen. So we’ve got a lot of lot of new faces, but it’s all coming together.”

2025 ACC Football Predicted Order of Finish
Rk  Team – Points
1. Clemson (167) – 3083
2. Miami (7) – 2679
3. SMU (2) – 2612
4. Georgia Tech (2) – 2397
5. Louisville – 2370
6. Duke – 1973
7. Florida State (4) – 1920
8. North Carolina – 1611
9. Pittsburgh – 1571
10. NC State – 1505
11. Virginia Tech (1) – 1412
12. Syracuse – 1381
13. Boston College – 953
14. Virginia – 871
15. California – 659
16. Wake Forest – 576
17. Stanford – 426

First-place votes in parentheses
183 media voters