Bill Belichick’s legacy takes a detour at North Carolina

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO look down to the sideline, at the man standing alone, squinting out at the field with his default look of irritation and disgust, and not wonder what he’s doing there. He looks at the papers he’s holding, squinting harder, and jots down something with the pencil stub in his right hand before peering back onto the field as if he’s trying to figure out what, exactly, is taking place in front of him.

He’s 73 years old, the hair under and inside his visor showing signs of early comb-over. There is a berth around him, a wide one, and it’s rare that he approaches anyone or anyone approaches him. An assistant runs over every so often and hands him a tablet that he jabs with his finger a few times before handing it back. He occasionally barks at an official. He walks to one end of the sideline to watch a few plays from behind the line of scrimmage and the negative space moves with him, like he’s emanating an invisible force field.

He is the most famous and successful coach in NFL history, long past the age of needing to prove anything to anybody, even further past the age of needing the money or the work, and yet there he is, coaching a University of North Carolina football team that, at 4-7, has proved stubbornly unable to bend to his will. It’s like watching a monarch preside over a small-town school board. He coached the most envied and despised team in the NFL, and now he coaches a below-average ACC team that elicits almost no emotional response. He continues to preach the tenets of his faith: Fix your mistakes, get better every day, do your job. There is not and never has been room for frivolity, or peripheral concerns of any flavor, or even outward signs of joy. The rare smile, the northern white rhino of the sports world, is more a baring of teeth. We are left to presume he enjoys what…