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Bill Belichick reveals Freddie Kitchens will remain on North Carolina staff

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The North Carolina Tar Heels introduced Bill Belichick as their next head football coach on Thursday afternoon. There, Belichick announced that Freddie Kitchens will be the first member of his staff in Chapel Hill.

Kitchens has been on the North Carolina staff since 2023 and following former head coach Mack Brown‘s departure, he was named interim head coach. Now, it appears that he’s going to be back for the 2025 season.

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“I also met with Coach Kitchens who will be the first member of the staff that we hire,” Bill Belichick said. “I have a ton of respect for him.”

Kitchens has been a head coach in the NFL, going 6-10 during the 2019 season when he led the Cleveland Browns. That came after he had spent the previous 13 seasons coaching in the NFL as an assistant. None of those roles he held were in New England under Belichick. Prior to being in the NFL, he did get his coaching start in the college ranks.

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While Belichick did share that Kitchens would be the first member of his staff, he did not note what role he would fill.

When Kitchens was working under Mack Brown at North Carolina, he was the tight ends coach and run game coordinator. He has also coached tight ends, running backs, and quarterbacks in the NFL as well as being an offensive coordinator. For his own part, Kitchens was a quarterback in his playing career for the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Off the field, Belichick has also already hired Michael Lombardi to be a general manager for the program. As Lombardi explained earlier in the day on The Pat McAfee Show, the reason he wanted to work at North Carolina went back to Belichick.

“We got here because of my great respect for the greatest coach of all time, Bill Belichick,” Michael Lombardi said. “That’s why I’m here because there was never a time in my life that I enjoyed more in my professional career than working for him and building football teams with him, and understanding and learning the game of football from him. So, this is an opportunity that really kind of came about because of that.”

It’s obviously early in Belichick’s North Carolina tenure, but it will be interesting to see how the rest of Belichick’s staff is filled out. In particular, it will be interesting to see how many other former NFL coaches join North Carolina.