Report: Hard Knocks to feature North Carolina, Bill Belichick in offseason series

‘Hard Knocks’ had seemingly become a bit of an irritant in the NFL. That’s why, with the biggest hire of the coaching cycle, the show is now instead coming to college football.

Per Ryan Glasspiegel at Front Office Sports, ‘Hard Knocks’ will feature the North Carolina Tar Heels, now coached by Bill Belichick, after not finding a team that wanted to participate in it in the NFL.

“BREAKING: Bill Belichick and UNC will be featured on Offseason Hard Knocks after NFL Films could not find an NFL team to do it after the Joe Schoen debacle last year, sources tell @FOS,” Glasspiegel tweeted on Friday.

‘Hard Knocks’ has aired nearly two decades worth of seasons since 2001 from those at NFL Films and HBO. The award-winning show documents a selected franchise coming through training camp and into the upcoming season in the National Football League.

Over half of the league has been on the show in that time with the Ravens, Cowboys, Chiefs, Bengals, Jets, Dolphins, Falcons, Texans, Rams, Buccaneers, Browns, Raiders, Chargers, Lions, Giants, and Bears. The show had also recently done an in-season edition since 2021 with the Colts, Cardinals, Dolphins, and the entirety of one season spent on the AFC North.

Again, though, ‘Hard Knocks’ can be a distraction for teams to deal with. Teams had not volunteered as much with there being a selection process to decide which franchises would be candidates for the doc. That collection, per Glasspiegel, was apparently even less after last year’s edition with the New York Giants, especially considering how some of those clips played in reference to their management.

One team that didn’t ever make that list, though, was the New England Patriots, with the show spanning the entire tenure of none other than Belichick.

Now, ‘Hard Knocks’ will get to follow the new venture for Belichick in Chapel Hill. After a season away from the field in hopes of another job at the next level, Belichick took the Tar Heels’ job back in December in an unbelievable hire by UNC. It will now be his first work at the collegiate level with there being high hopes of what the program could be in his tenure there.

North Carolina has been one of college football’s biggest stories since Belichick’s hiring. It will continue to be going into this spring and next fall with parts of that now being documented by ‘Hard Knocks.’