Bill Belichick launches spring practice as coach of “33rd NFL team”

The University of North Carolina has launched its first spring football practice under coach Bill Belichick. On Wednesday, Belichick met with reporters for the first time since he was introduced as the team’s new head coach.

Although, as noted by Pat Forde of SI.com, the Belichick-led Tar Heels dub themselves the “33rd NFL team,” more than a few of the far more accomplished college programs would beg to differ. Also, the victories Belichick engineers definitely won’t count in the pursuit of Don Shula. Still, it’s all part of the Lombo-crafted shtick.

It’s also a somewhat ironic label, given that Belichick and G.M. Mike Lombardi have (as Lombardi explains it) disdain for the NFL — and that two hiring cycles have come and gone with Belichick getting a total of one interview and zero offers.

But, yes, he’s running the Tar Heels program the same way he ran the Patriots. Via Forde, there are no numbers on the jerseys, and definitely no names. There’s one major change from the NFL to the NCAA, however.

“I’d say the biggest difference is just the opportunity to put on pads in the spring,” Belichick said. “As I said when I was in Washington last year [with his son, Steve], the improvement that those players made in the spring was, I thought, remarkable. We just couldn’t do that in the National Football League because we never got the pads.”

They have the pads now. There are no offseason workout rules. No preseason practice rules. No in-season limitations on the number of padded practices.

That makes it not really the NFL’s 33rd team. Instead, it makes North Carolina a program that an NFL coach can run without the player safety protections for which the NFL Players Association has collectively bargained. So, in college, he really can be the king.

We’ll see what his army will be able to do when it’s time to go to battle against the best that the various other college-football kingdoms have to offer.

It still remains to be seen whether we get a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes. The offseason Hard Knocks deal is dead, but there could be an all-access show produced by another company.

On Wednesday, Belichick didn’t get a single question about his recent Hard Knocks life lesson. Which, at least for now, reveals another similarity to his NFL experience — a press corps that treads lightly in order to avoid displeasing the commander-in-chief.