OLD BETHPAGE, New York — Bruce Bennett may have been to more NHL games than anyone in history, and the 69-year-old’s house offers glimpses into the career that’s put him rinkside so many times over more than five decades.

Signed jerseys, sticks and photos of Wayne Gretzky line the living room walls, many inscribed with notes thanking Bennett for his friendship and work. There’s a model Stanley Cup. And a closet full of camera lenses, wires and other equipment.

Bennett has a lofted office over the living room. A few of his photographs hang framed on its walls. There’s a bookshelf full of hockey and photography books, as well as a plastic rat that hit him on the head when the Florida Panthers were celebrating their 2024 Stanley Cup Final win. On the bottom shelf, there’s a shot of John Tavares’ first NHL goal.

“What a shot!” the former New York Islanders captain inscribed on the photo.

Scotty Bowman coached 2,141 NHL games. Patrick Marleau played 1,779. David Poile spent 3,075 games as a general manager, though executives don’t always attend every game. Lou Lamoriello is closing in on that record with 2,868.

Bennett has photographed more than 5,000.

“I could do a game every other day through an entire season, but I’m too greedy,” Bennett says. “So if there’s four games in four nights, chances are I’m going to take all four. Don’t want to leave anything on the table.”

As of July 2, when Bennett most recently updated his statistics, he had been to 5,240 NHL games between the regular season and playoffs. Of those, 44 have been Stanley Cup deciders. If you include preseason, he’s been to 328 more. If you count all hockey games — international, PHWL, junior, exhibitions, etc. — he was up to 6,142 over the summer.

The Islanders presented him with a customized No. 5000 jersey when he reached that mark. It’s framed right above a shelf of toys for his grandchildren.

Now the director of hockey photography at Getty Images, Bennett was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. When he was in elementary school, he borrowed his father’s Kodak Instamatic to snap pictures on school field trips. “Horrible photos,” he calls them, but they sparked a passion.

He first shot a hockey game as a 17- or 18-year-old at Madison Square Garden. He didn’t have a press credential, so he took pictures from the balcony. Around the same time, he snuck into the Islanders photo box and shot the game. He mailed a few of his pictures to the Hockey News and asked if they’d be interested in using his work. The publication said yes, which got Bennett a photography credential and kicked off what has become a legendary career — one that has given Bennett a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in hockey history.

Whether they know it or not, sports fans’ lasting memories of those seminal hockey moments are often seen through Bennett’s lens.

How does he capture them, and what are the ones that mean the most to him?

To give a sense of it, he walked The Athletic through 10 of his favorite photos, his process of creating the shots and why he values them.

Varlamov from above

To get a shot from above, Bennett has to walk along the arena catwalk and attach a remote camera into the rafters. Then, while shooting a game from ice-level, he presses a button on a remote that will trigger the rafter camera to snap pictures.

Walking above the rink is not for the faint of heart, but don’t get fooled by the fact that Bennett does it. “I am scared s—less of heights,” he says.

Getty Images likes its photographers to be creative, and Bennett had the idea to set one camera above the net with a slower shutter speed. That way, if a goalie was on top of the puck during a net-front scramble, he’d appear still with a blur of action all around him. Bennett got his wish with this photo of New York Islanders goalie Semyon Varlamov.

Yzerman in the box

Red Wings Hall of Famer Steve Yzerman leans on the boards in 1984.

The old photo boxes at Nassau Coliseum were positioned right between the penalty boxes, which allowed Bennett to capture a photo of the Detroit Red Wings’ young Steve Yzerman in 1984. It was an ideal position in many ways: He was close enough to smell the liniment on players’ skin and hear them trash talk.

There were drawbacks, too. Bennett got hit by plenty of pucks flung by players trying to get out of their defensive zone. Nowadays he shoots from the corner of rinks, where there are 4-by-5-inch holes for camera lenses.

Richter and Vanbiesbrouck’s shared jersey

Rangers goalies Mike Richter and John Vanbiesbrouck pose together in 1991.

The Hockey News assigned Bennett to take a photo of New York Rangers goalies Mike Richter and John Vanbiesbrouck, who shared the net in the early 1990s. Ahead of the shoot, Bennett purchased the biggest Rangers jersey possible and cut the back of it so both could squeeze into it. He remembers feeling weird destroying an expensive jersey.

“I hope this works,” he thought to himself while making the cut.

Fortunately, both goalies were into the idea and happily posed for the photo. Afterward, Bennett didn’t know what to do with the jersey, so he had Richter and Vanbiesbrouck sign it. Now it’s in a frame in his living room, matted over a copy of the shot for which it was used.

Penguins forward Patric Hornqvist and Devils goalie Cory Schneider watch the puck enter the net in 2017.

Bennett sometimes puts a camera into the base of the net. He secures it inside a polycarbonate box, then can snap photos remotely with the same type of clicker he uses for his rafter shots. He likes this photo, which shows the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Patric Hornqvist scoring on Cory Schneider, because you can see the New Jersey Devils’ logo on the puck, as well as the symmetry of the players and the scoreboard showing New Jersey was on the penalty kill.

“It’s such a great angle,” he says. “To me, it’s a little cliched at this point. … But when you get a good one, it’s a good one.”

Crosby’s golden goal

Sidney Crosby celebrates an overtime goal on Ryan Miller in 2010.

Before the end of Olympic gold medal and Stanley Cup-clinching games, Bennett has to line up at the Zamboni corner, where he’ll get let onto the ice for the postgame presentation. He hates it.

“Horrible,” he says. “You’re standing there and you’re looking at the scoreboard. You can’t shoot.”

Bennett had a camera set up in the rafters during the 2010 Olympic gold medal game between the U.S. and Canada. During overtime, he got on his knees so he could look up at the scoreboard. As Crosby received a pass from Jarome Iginla, Bennett held down his remote button, hoping the scoreboard monitor was synchronized with real-time action. Thankfully for him, it was. He got the shot he was looking for.

“It’s the moment that Canada sighed (its) relief,” he says.

Gainey with the Cup

Bob Gainey lifts the Stanley Cup in 1979.

Bennett found himself in a predicament after the Montreal Canadiens beat the Rangers to win the 1979 Stanley Cup in five games. He couldn’t find his way onto the ice and didn’t know French, so he ran both ways around the rink trying to figure out how to get close to the celebration. Eventually, he gave up trying to get on the ice and made his way to the stands. He stood on a chair and snapped photos as best he could.

“A couple fans, instead of clapping for their hometown, were holding me up so I could take pictures, which was really nice for the Anglophone, stupid American,” he says.

He got lucky with a photo of Hall of Famer Bob Gainey. It’s a symbol, Bennett says, of the glory of winning the Stanley Cup.

Young Gretzky

Wayne Gretzky stands in the Oilers locker room in 1979.

This photo of Wayne Gretzky is the cover for the English edition of Bennett’s book, “Hockey’s Greatest Photos.” It’s from Gretzky’s final WHA game with the Edmonton Oilers. Back then, photographers were allowed in the locker room after games, which is how Bennett got this shot.

“High school shoulder pads,” Bennett says. “Skinny, scrawny guy.”

It was the first famous photo he took of Gretzky, who wrote the foreword to “Hockey’s Greatest Photos.” Bennett took the lasting image of Gretzky scoring his 77th goal of the 1981-82 season, breaking Phil Esposito’s record. He doesn’t view that photo as anything special artistically, but it captured a moment in history. A signed copy hangs in Bennett’s living room.

Bennett’s relationship with Gretzky has spanned decades now. Gretzky brought him along as the official photographer of the Ninety Nine All Stars tour, which took place during the 1994-95 lockout, and Bennett shot Gretzky’s fantasy camps, too. That’s the source of some of the memorabilia on his wall.

Bossy’s burning stick

The Islanders’ Mike Bossy poses for a portrait in 1980.

Bennett staged this picture for the Hockey News in the locker room at Nassau Coliseum. Look closely and you’ll notice Bossy is still wearing a towel from the showers. To create the image, Bennett put kerosene on the base of the stick and then lit it on fire.

“We had a bucket of water there, but it eventually burnt up the cotton and then dissipated on its own,” he says.

Bossy was part of the Islanders four-peat from 1980 to ’83. That era of hockey came at a good time for Bennett.

“I think it was a moment that helped turn my career a bit,” he says. “Not only that you had a dynasty growing on Long Island, but the fact that I was smart enough or able enough to turn off the fan switch in my head and focus on the task of doing the job.”

Potvin hits Lafleur

The Islanders’ Denis Potvin upends the Canadiens’ Guy Lafleur in the early 1980s.

This photo of Denis Potvin hitting Guy Lafleur is one of Bennett’s early-career favorites.

“It was one of the first best shots that I had,” he says.

He says he would have considered using it as the cover photo for his book, had it worked horizontally. It’s similar to a photo he took in the 2024 playoffs of Carolina’s Dmitry Orlov hitting the Rangers’ Jonny Brodzinski and leaving him in a similar position as Lafleur. But, he says, “Slight difference in Hall of Fame status. No offense to Jonny.”

Martinez’s Cup-winning goal

The Kings celebrate Alec Martinez’s Cup-winning goal in 2014.

When Bennett lectures on sports photography, he stresses the power of capturing celebration and dejection in the same frame. That’s exactly what he got when Alec Martinez scored on Henrik Lundqvist to win the 2014 Stanley Cup Final.

“It’s gold,” Bennett says. “Lundqvist was a guy who, his emotions, even with a mask and everything, you could just tell by body language.”

The Kings celebrating so close to him added to the impact of the image, which he took with a remote camera positioned in the rafters.

“I’m getting ready to be pushed out on the ice, so I’m just blindly holding that button,” he says.

More than two hours before the Rangers game Nov. 30 against Montreal, Bennett is crouched in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, attaching his camera into place at the base of the game net. His plan is to shoot the 1 p.m. Rangers game, then take a train to UBS Arena to take photos of Islanders-Buffalo Sabres in the evening.

Bennett’s proximity to multiple teams in the New York area has always allowed him to shoot lots of games, and the passion that carried him as an 18-year-old doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“It’s hard to walk away,” he says. “It’s like a professional athlete.”

Bennett starts his work days in his office looking at the photos Getty shooters took the night before. He’ll send out emails, some complimentary, some constructive and some sarcastic. He watches NHL Network and will download media notes for the next game he’s shooting. He’ll note which players are coming up on milestones so he’s prepared to catch the big moments.

During hockey’s summer hiatus, Bennett keeps himself busy with … photography. He enjoys going on day trips around Long Island and shooting pictures of wildlife. He has one of his favorites, an eagle in Centerpoint catching a fish, blown up and framed in his office.

Then, when the season starts up, he’s always ready to go.

“The expression a golfer would say — one great shot brings you back the next day — that’s how I feel about a hockey game,” he says. “If you’re not there, you’re not getting it.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Peter Baugh / The Athletic; Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

Fabio Capello didn’t stick around.

The Calciopoli trial had not yet delivered a verdict but the writing was on the wall. A break clause in his contract with Juventus gave him a get-out and, on July 4, 2006, he exercised it. Capello was recognised as football’s leading coach at the time. He had won eight league titles in 15 years. His past as a player with Juventus did not, however, make him unconditionally loyal.

When the club were relegated to Serie B for the first time in their history, docked an initial 30 points and stripped of the two championships he’d won (2004-05, 2005-06), Capello was already back in Valdebebas, a second spell with Real Madrid underway. Fabio Cannavaro, the World Cup and soon-to-be Ballon d’Or-winning centre-back, followed him to the Bernabeu along with Emerson, the Brazilian twine running through Capello’s last Scudetti at Roma and Juve.

The scandal, which led to lifetime bans for Juventus’ general manager Luciano Moggi and chief executive Antonio Giraudo, was not about match-fixing, but rather a network of power and influence. It remains a bitterly disputed watershed moment in the history of Italian football, a forever war, which brings us to Juventus’ opponents in the Champions League on Wednesday night, Manchester City.

To paraphrase the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), the 115 charges brought by the Premier League against City are different from the allegations the Italian Football Federation made against Juventus and others in 2006.

City welcomed “the review by an independent commission, to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” they claim will exonerate them from charges that include a failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments, breaches of profit and sustainability rules (PSR) and compliance with UEFA’s FFP regulations.

Nevertheless, in the worst-case scenario for City, the outcome might resemble what Juventus reckoned with almost two decades ago. Pep Guardiola has repeatedly addressed the threat of relegation. “I said when all the clubs accused us of doing something wrong and people say: ‘What if we are relegated?’ I will be here. I don’t know the position they are going to bring us, the Conference? (But) next year we will come up and come up and come back to the Premier League.”

Whether Guardiola’s promise is tested by the verdict or not remains to be seen. The Athletic broke the news of his contract extension last month, a testament to his enduring confidence in the club. How the players would react to a still hypothetical relegation is another unknown. As was the case with Capello, who still considers Calciopoli a “comic” injustice. He thought the punishment was “over the top” and continues to recognise the two revoked titles, as the players involved do, as won sul campo (on the pitch). Zlatan Ibrahimovic thought “most of it” was “bullshit”. “Referees giving us preferential treatment?” he sounded off in his book. “Come on! We’d struggled hard out there. We’d risked our necks and didn’t have any damn referees in our pockets — no way!”

Still, it didn’t stop the Swede from wanting out. He looked at Juventus as a “sinking ship” with Lilian Thuram and Gianluca Zambrotta jumping overboard for Barcelona, Cannavaro and Emerson for Real Madrid. “All the rest of us who were still left were ringing our agents, saying: ‘Sell us, sell us. What prospects are out there?’”

Capello’s replacement Didier Deschamps told Ibrahimovic he’d quit if the striker left. “’Okay, pack your bags and I’ll ring for a taxi,’ I said, and he laughed, as if I was joking,” Ibrahimovic recalled. He was 25, a year older than Erling Haaland is now, a player with whom he shared the late Mino Raiola as agent and Ibrahimovic wasn’t prepared to waste one year of his career in the second division and at least two outside the Champions League. “If you offered me €20m (a year — £16.5m/$21.1m at current rates) to stay, I wouldn’t be interested,” Ibrahimovic told Juventus’ incoming CEO Jean-Claude Blanc, who currently sits on the board at Manchester United as part of his remit as head of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS Sport.

Ibrahimovic played for Juventus between 2004 and 2006 (PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP via Getty Images)

The rush to judgment on Juventus — the FIGC (Italian Football Federation) took just two months and 12 days to bring proceedings to a close — remains a sore point. By contrast, it is almost two years since the Premier League announced that its investigation into City had escalated into 115 charges. “Timing and rules were not respected,” Capello said in an interview with Corriere della Sera. “Sporting justice wasn’t given the chance to operate correctly.” In a later legal claim, Giraudo felt Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated as he and his lawyers were given only seven days to prepare their defences, an insufficient time for reading a dossier of more than 7,000 pages.

Capello thought Guido Rossi, the special commissioner appointed by the FIGC to lead the case, “acted too hastily”. For a summer, Guido became the most famous Rossi in Italy, only far more controversial than Paolo, the 1982 World Cup winner. He still is on the internet forums and threads that won’t move on from Calciopoli.

Rossi’s suitability for the role of special commissioner, given his past on Inter’s board between 1995 and 1999, was debated at the time and has been ever since. It has nourished conspiracy theories. In what felt like the latest in an ever-increasing series of echoes of mid-2000s Serie A in contemporary Premier League life, English football got a slight taste for the kind of frenzy this produced when City fans found out that Murray Rosen KC, the lawyer overseeing the Premier League panel looking into the club’s alleged breaches, is an Arsenal supporter.

Del Piero celebrates after Juventus won Serie A in 2004-2005, a trophy that was later stripped from them (Giuseppe Cacace/Getty Images)

Amid signalling from UEFA that they would like everything wrapped up by July 28 so the governing body and competition promoter knew the identity of the Italian teams participating in their competitions the following season, Juventus’ initial relegation and 30-point deduction was confirmed earlier that week, only the penalty was reduced, on appeal, to 17 points and would, in October, be commuted to nine.

More poisonous was the decision to leave one of Juventus’ two revoked titles unassigned and award the other from 2005-06 to Inter. “A lot of time has passed since Calciopoli,” Giorgio Chiellini reflected in his memoir. “I can only reiterate that those two titles were won on the pitch, simply because we were better, even if laying claim to them now is a losing battle. I am convinced that not even Inter, who finished third that (2005-06) season, feel it as one of their own; it was a mistake to assign it over the table, it would have been better not to give it to anyone.”

That the Italian sporting justice system did so set a precedent. Jose Mourinho has had two spells in Italy; one with Inter, the other with Roma. He likes to hit a nerve. Upon inheriting an Inter team that found its principal rivals defanged by Calciopoli, Mourinho brought up the scandal when it suited him and joked that the penalty area was bigger for Juventus than everyone else in Italy. One of the most iconic moments in Inter’s treble-winning season in 2010 came when he made a famous handcuff gesture during a 0-0 draw with Samp to suggest the establishment was doing everything — his team were down to nine men at the time — to stop them.

Mourinho’s handcuff gesture during a game against Sampdoria in 2010 (Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)

It has hardly come as a surprise, then, to hear Mourinho bring up City’s 115 charges, as he did, in defence of his record at Man United when his old club travelled to Istanbul to play his latest team, Fenerbahce, during the autumn. “As you know, we won the Europa League (in 2017) and we finished second in the Premier League (in 2018),” Mourinho said. “I think we still have a chance to win that league because maybe they punish Man City with points and maybe we win that league and then they have to pay me the bonus and give me the medal.”

GO DEEPER

Explained: If Manchester City are punished will clubs face big bonus bills?

Only last week, Mourinho couldn’t resist another comment on the back of City losing to Liverpool at Anfield, the chants of sacked in the morning and Guardiola gesturing six to signify the number of Premier Leagues he has won in England. “Guardiola won six trophies and I won three, but I won fairly and cleanly. If I lost, I want to congratulate my opponent for being better than me. I don’t want to win by dealing with 150 lawsuits.” Whether this is the continued Mourinho-ification of the Premier League discourse from afar or something new — the Serie A-fication of it — is blurry.

Upon relegation in 2006, Juventus fell from third in the Deloitte Money League (where they narrowly trailed Real Madrid and Barcelona) to 12th. Revenue fell by €106million (42 per cent) as commercial partners like Nike renegotiated their contracts to reflect Juventus’ fall in status. Never outside the top five in Deloitte’s rankings up until then, Juventus have never been back.

Some of that is systemic. Domestic TV rights in Italy went from being negotiated on an individual basis, guaranteeing the big clubs huge chunks of broadcast revenue, to a collective bargaining process. The league wasn’t as commercially-minded as the Premier League and didn’t sell itself abroad as aggressively, which is one of the explanations for the wealth chasm between England and not only Italy but the rest of Europe.

Things would have been worse for Juventus had Blanc not followed through on existing plans to build a new stadium on the site of the old Stadio Delle Alpi, which became a major revenue driver in the context of Italian football where the infrastructures of Juventus’ rivals are old and council-owned. That they came back shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Juventus’ Allianz Stadium (Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

It took time (and the rise of Andrea Agnelli to the chairmanship) for the Bianconeri to reassert themselves as Italy’s most successful domestic team. Once they did, the sense of revenge within an Old Lady scorned was so strong it gives a sense to the relentless drive behind a record nine consecutive league titles. Juventus were making up for seasons and titles lost. 

Returning to the subject of a hypothetical relegation, Guardiola recently said: “Seventy-five per cent of the (Premier League) clubs want it, because I know what they do behind the scenes and this sort of stuff.” Were it to come to pass, it would interesting to see how City’s global and regional partners might react bearing in mind, as detailed in this special report by The Athletic in 2022, the extent to which the club are still dependent on sponsors with business links to the country of their principal owners, Abu Dhabi. Juventus’ majority shareholders, EXOR, the holding company of the Agnelli family, has broad shoulders with a market cap of more than €20billion. Often likened to Italy’s Kennedys, the Agnellis are not, however, a royal family running a gulf state.  

The decision of the independent panel, when it comes, will be pored over and scrutinised like no other in Premier League history. Bouncing back from relegation at the first attempt and returning to the Champions League after their first season in Serie A did not mean bygones were bygones. When Andrea Agnelli, the cousin of EXOR chairman and family scion John Elkann, became president of Juventus in 2010, he left the distinct impression the club hadn’t defended itself hard enough during the Calciopoli hearings. He proudly recognised the two revoked titles in their roll of honour and in displays at the Allianz Stadium.

Former Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli (Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Getty Images)

As anyone who studied Juventus’ accounts, specifically item 54 (the ‘Relevant Pending Disputes’ section) during Agnelli’s 12-year tenure knows, Juventus filed an appeal in November 2011 before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court requesting that the (FIGC) be ordered to pay compensation for “the damage suffered due to the illegitimate exercise of administrative activity and the failure to exercise mandatory activity, in relation to the administrative measures adopted by the FIGC relating to the awarding of the title “Italian Champion” to F.C. Internazionale Milano S.p.A. for the 2005/2006 football championship.”

Juventus wanted Inter stripped of the 2005-06 title, the Scudetto from that year to go unassigned like the 2004-05 one, and “the equivalent of the payment of €443,725,200.00, plus legal interest from the date of the claim up until the final balance” in damages. That pursuit only ended, under a new Juventus board, in October 2023.

By that time, Agnelli had left the club. He formalised his resignation at a shareholders assembly in spring 2023 (he and the entire board had announced they would step down in late 2022), amid an investigation into cross-party-transactions (player trading commonly regarded as swap deals) and the way the club structured wage payments during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The federal prosecutor of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) had lost an initial case into player trading and failed in an appeal but then, in early 2023, it got the appeal revoked on the grounds of new evidence gathered in a separate criminal case into the financial affairs of a club listed on the Milan stock exchange. Juventus denied any wrongdoing but were deducted 15 points, which was later suspended and then reduced to 10 in May 2023, resulting in them finishing seventh in Serie A that season. Agnelli was given a two-year ban from Italian football, and there was a 30-month ban for Fabio Paratici, the club’s former sporting director, who at that point was managing director of football at Tottenham. The hearings into the criminal case that sparked the re-opening of the sporting case have only now started to get underway in Rome.

At the assembly in which Agnelli left his position (in early 2023), the former general manager Moggi sensationally appeared waving a USB stick. “If it’s true they have reopened the plusvalenze case because they think they have found new elements,” he said, “it is equally true that we should reopen Calciopoli, a wound that still does not heal for either us or Juventus.”

Moggi’s gift — he wrapped the USB up and stuck a bow on it — came while Giraudo, another member of the triad of executives who ran Juventus between 1994 and 2006 (the other member was Roberto Bettega) was going from the European Court of Human Rights to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court to challenge the Italian sporting justice system’s status and compatibility with EU law (that was deemed inadmissible due to lack of jurisdiction).

The hatchet, if buried, is never in anything other than a shallow grave when it comes to Calciopoli. Closure has been fleeting, illusory. The Premier League and City must hope, whatever the independent panel decides, that this is nipped in the bud once and for all and doesn’t have a similarly long and poisonous tail.

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

North Carolina still needs a new football coach. Will its search end with a respected name from the college ranks, or a revered eight-time Super Bowl champion who has never coached college football?

Finding someone to replace the program’s all-time winningest coach Mack Brown, who was fired in late November, has proven tougher than the Tar Heels initially thought. Meanwhile, UNC’s ongoing contact with former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick has hung over the search as a wild card that would represent a dramatic reversal in the anticipated process of filling one of the most enticing job openings in the college coaching carousel.

In an appearance Monday on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Belichick confirmed that he had spoken with UNC chancellor Lee Roberts but declined to elaborate on specifics of their conversations.

“We’ve had a couple of good conversations, so we’ll see how it goes,” Belichick said.

Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, arguably the top candidate from the Group of 5 level, said Sunday that he isn’t leaving for any coaching vacancy this cycle. On Monday, Tulane’s athletic director announced the school and Sumrall have agreed to a contract extension.

There was growing optimism Monday night from the UNC side that a deal will get done, a person who has been involved in the search told The Athletic. The source also cautioned that nothing had been finalized and Belichick could still change course. No matter who eventually gets the job, what has transpired behind the scenes since Brown’s firing — and for most of the last six months in Chapel Hill — highlights the type of disagreement and dysfunction that can arise inside a major college athletic department. A UNC spokesperson said the school cannot comment on ongoing coaching searches.

From conversations with multiple people briefed on the search, granted anonymity in order to discuss the ongoing process, here’s what we know so far, and where the search may lead next.

The power struggle at the center of UNC’s search

Part of the explanation for why UNC’s coaching search has played out this publicly traces back to May, when North Carolina’s Board of Trustees — the 13-person group that serves as the school’s top governing body — approved an audit of the university’s athletic department. At the time, Board of Trustees chair John Preyer publicly scolded athletic director Bubba Cunningham over “the level of bad data that has been provided” to the committee regarding UNC athletics’ financials. Then-interim chancellor Roberts (who has since had the interim tag removed) responded by backing Cunningham in the face of that criticism, saying, “Our athletic director is one of the most senior, well-respected, admired athletic directors in the country.”

Days later, a local judge granted a temporary restraining order against Preyer and the board, preventing them from discussing athletics financials in a closed-door session. But that interaction was the first public sign of the long-simmering power struggle between Cunningham, who has been in his role since 2011, and the board. Preyer did not respond to a request for comment via email.

According to sources briefed on the situation, both camps have been frustrated with each other for months, if not longer. Brown did not feel like Cunningham was giving him the resources necessary to continue building UNC into an elite football program — despite the Tar Heels being third in the ACC in football spending in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. UNC completed a $40.2 million indoor practice facility in 2019 and recently renovated both its locker and weight rooms, but with a revenue sharing structure arriving next year as a result of the House v. NCAA settlement, what constitutes the “necessary” level of investment is going to change in the immediate future.

Cunningham, meanwhile, was frustrated by Brown, who long maintained he would remain UNC’s coach until the program was in a suitable place to “pass off” to someone else, only to stay on after quarterback Drake Maye left for the NFL last winter. This year’s Week 1 starting quarterback, Max Johnson, was sidelined by a broken leg in the season-opening win at Minnesota. After an embarrassing 70-50 mid-September loss to James Madison, Brown reportedly told players he would “walk away and step down if he was the problem,” then expressed regret for the comments two days later while confirming he would stay with the team. The Tar Heels went 6-6, a clear step backward from 2023’s 8-4 squad.

Behind closed doors, Brown — with the backing of the Board of Trustees and other high-profile donors, all of whom were integral to his return as UNC’s coach in 2018 — was a walking challenge to the idea that anyone but the coach himself was in control of his exit timeline.

At his Monday media availability before the season finale against NC State, Brown was asked point-blank if he planned to return next season as UNC’s coach. He said yes.

Within 24 hours, Cunningham and Roberts had dismissed Brown remotely from Hawaii, where they were following the UNC men’s basketball program at the Maui Invitational. Preyer publicly criticized the administration’s handling of Brown’s exit days later.

“I have no doubt coach Brown would have done whatever the university would have wanted him to do at the end of the season,” Preyer said. “And for some reason that I do not understand, the athletic director would not allow that to happen and instead fired him from halfway around the world … I think that is shameful.”

Mixed signals

After Brown was fired, Cunningham appeared on UNC’s “Carolina Insider” podcast and detailed what he was looking for in the Tar Heels’ next football coach.

“There’s a certain person that’s best suited at the right time, at the right place. Right now, that’s what we’re looking for,” Cunningham said. “We have to develop this program. As we’ve said, we’ve been right at the cusp of really great seasons: getting to eight, nine wins. How do we get to 10, 11? Who can get us to that level?”

The Tar Heels also had reason to replace the 73-year-old Brown with a younger coach more suited for the long haul of elevating the program, which has consistently run up against a ceiling below conference championship and College Football Playoff contention. With help from an advisory committee, Cunningham said on Dec. 3 that his intention was to cull the roughly 30 names he had on an initial list down to 10-12 for Zoom interviews and proceed from there. “But all the coaches we’re talking to right now are playing, and so they’re continuing to be in championship games or in the playoffs,” he added. “So it’ll probably take a week or so.”

The list included Belichick, per a senior school official briefed on the search process.

With a smaller-than-usual number of power-conference head coaching jobs changing hands this season, UNC was widely expected to be one of the most coveted openings.

But then last week, as the Tar Heels’ top college targets showed less interest than expected, the program started engaging more seriously with a seemingly “out of left field” candidate: Belichick.

Belichick spent this season out of coaching after parting ways with the Patriots in January. But The Athletic confirmed that North Carolina officials — including Cunningham — spoke to Belichick last Wednesday, before meeting with him in person on Thursday. Sources familiar with the board’s thinking believe that it, as well as UNC’s highest-profile boosters, would prefer that Belichick be the one to succeed Brown.

Belichick may have never coached in college, but he has spent ample time in the last year around the University of Washington’s program, where his son Steve serves as the Huskies’ defensive coordinator. Sources familiar with Bill Belichick’s thinking say the coach has been encouraged by seeing college players pick up his schemes. Belichick is only 15 wins away from breaking Don Shula’s all-time NFL wins record, but sources close to Belichick say he was turned off by the NFL’s hiring cycle last winter, when only the Atlanta Falcons opted to interview him out of eight total openings. Belichick was expected to have a stronger NFL market this offseason; three franchises have already fired their coaches — the New York Jets, the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints — with another five to seven expected to open up.

“Any time as a coach you join with an organization, whatever level it’s at, you just want a shared vision with that person,” Belichick said on “The Pat McAfee Show”. “What are your goals, what are your expectations, what do you need to achieve those, how do we achieve them and so forth. Talking through a lot of things — I don’t think it really matters where the program is — there are a lot of things that go into that, team building, and the structure of the program and so forth, that take some time to just talk through.”

Bill Belichick emphasized “IF” he was coaching in a college program, it would be “a professional program.” 👀 @PatMcAfeeShow

“The college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that have the ability to play in the NFL.” pic.twitter.com/p2raPzm2DN

— ESPN (@espn) December 9, 2024

Adding to the uncertainty, multiple people briefed on the school’s conversations with Belichick have described a disconnect between the coach’s and the school’s expectations for the terms of the job, should Belichick take the plunge into college coaching. Part of the disconnect comes from the impression that Preyer and at least one other member of UNC’s board presented Belichick with a preliminary offer to make him the Tar Heels’ next coach. Any board member going over top university officials’ heads to do so would violate the university’s bylaws, which would be grounds for dismissal from the board. A senior school official briefed on the search lamented Preyer and other outside voices’ meddling and said the process likely would have been completed by now if not for their involvement.

UNC’s finances are another potential complication. The school paid Brown, who entered this season as one of three active national championship-winning coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision, $5 million in total compensation. How much could the program realistically afford to pay Belichick — formerly the NFL’s highest-paid coach, believed to be earning at least $20 million per year from New England — plus an entirely new staff? And would there still be enough thereafter for North Carolina to field a competitive roster built to Belichick’s liking?

Who else, if not Belichick?

Amid the uncertainty around who is actually making this hire, Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell declined to meet with UNC on Sunday, according to sources familiar with his thinking and those briefed on UNC’s search.

As the search continues, other college options could emerge in the wake of Sumrall’s and Campbell’s withdrawals. Army coach Jeff Monken could be a logical target. He has been wildly successful in 11 years at the service academy (81-56) and has made it known that he is not married to running a triple-option offense at other programs.

But Monken also has one more very important game to play, against Navy this weekend, and no coach wants to seriously engage with another school while preparing for his current team’s most important game. So if Monken is indeed a desirable candidate for UNC, it will take at least a few more days for the search to conclude.

Former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks — who is from nearby Charlotte and spent last season as an advisor with the Charlotte 49ers — also spoke with UNC officials the same day school representatives first made contact with Belichick, according to a source briefed on Wilks’ thinking. Wilks coached UNC and Pro Football Hall of Famer Julius Peppers for several seasons while both were with the Carolina Panthers. Should Wilks earn the UNC job, it would be expected that Peppers — who has spent time in an advisory role with the Carolina Panthers since retiring in 2019 — would also return to his alma mater in a more pronounced role, likely related to the program’s name, image and likeness efforts.

Meanwhile, college football’s winter transfer portal window opened Monday. Most schools with head coach vacancies, many of which made changes after UNC fired Brown, have filled their jobs with the portal period in mind. That UNC remains open suggests a process that has been unusual. The school certainly can’t wait until Belichick goes through the NFL hiring cycle in January and February to fill its head coaching job.

If the Tar Heels really want to hire Belichick, and Belichick really wants the job, the time for it to happen would be … pretty much now.

— The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman, Dianna Russini and Jeff Howe contributed reporting.

(Photo: Grant Halverson / Getty Images)