Belichick effect: UNC football sells out of 2025 season tickets, even with price increase

Bill Belichick’s hire as North Carolina’s football coach has boosted interest in the Tar Heels’ program.

And we’re not just talking about the frenzy around his relationship with girlfriend Jordon Hudson.

North Carolina has sold out of its season-ticket allotment for the 2025 season even with the average ticket price climbing 25%. Belichick, 73, has never coached in college, but he won six Super Bowls as the head coach of the New England Patriots and is one of the winningest professional football coaches ever.

“It’s been the most significant uptick we’ve ever had,” UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham said last week.

He said there was “no pushback” to the price increase.

The Tar Heels sold 20,000 season tickets at Kenan Stadium, which has a capacity of 63,000. UNC must hold tickets for students, faculty, visiting opponents and others, Cunningham said. Several UNC football games in 2024 were sellouts, but the program didn’t sell out of season tickets.

UNC opens its 2025 — and the Belichick era — on Monday, Sept. 1 at home against TCU. The Tar Heels also host Richmond, Clemson, Virginia, Stanford and Duke this season.

Cunningham said some individual tickets are likely to go on sale this season.

“The support's been amazing,” Belichick told WRAL in an interview last week “The alumni, Carolina fans and great response from the players, the people there that are on the football staff and on the team. How hard they worked and their commitment to doing the best they can and try to put a good team together.”

Cunningham and Chancellor Lee Roberts acknowledged the bet they were making on football when Belichick was hired. UNC is paying Belichick $10 million annually in addition to increased spending on assistant coaches, support staff and personnel through revenue sharing. Schools are expected to be able to share up to $20.5 million directly with athletes beginning in July. Football players will receive the majority of that money.

The gamble was that increased interest and revenue would help cover those costs – and more. UNC’s total athletics budget was about $140 million. In 2022, the football program generated $67 million.

“We think sponsorship value will go up,” Cunningham said. “We also now have the new revenue distribution model within the ACC so that we’ll have more games in primetime, more games on ESPN, so our revenue share within the league will be greater. Our postseason participation for football, basketball, women’s basketball will increase next year." 

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said the league's television partners "ran to us" after the Belichick hire.

“We think the investment we’re making in the program itself will more than repay itself through those increases,” he said. “Sponsorship values for our multimedia partnerships should go up as well. That means the radio broadcast, the coach’s shows, any signage within the stadium, certainly TV visible signage has an increased value.”

UNC received $45.3 million in revenue distribution from the ACC for the 2023-24 academic year. The distribution includes money from conference television rights, football bowl games and the NCAA Tournament. The league will distribute revenue differently in the future with the latest expansion teams taking a smaller percentage and some of the television rights being earned through on-field success and television viewership.

With the implementation of revenue sharing, athletic departments are looking to increase their revenue. North Carolina was slow to add scoreboard advertising and permanent signage. It just added alcohol sales recently at football and men’s basketball games.

“Do you go to hard liquor?” Cunningham said. “Do you do more signs? Do you do more naming rights? Are we going to get to jersey patches? Can we create digital content or any other kind of content that we can monetize and sell to fans. There’s things that we haven’t done in the past. It’s just we didn’t feel like we needed to do. But as a not-for-profit, if you will, we’ve always spent what we created. Now we have another expense category, so we have to think about how do we cover that category with what we can create? Are there other expenses that we have that we don’t need anymore? Or should we limit what we do?”

North Carolina and ACC rival NC State don’t currently receive any money from the state through its distribution of revenue from the tax on sports betting operators. Other UNC System schools do receive money. Both the state Senate and House budgets would include UNC and NC State in the distribution formula, though the Senate budget includes much more money for the two schools.