The Dictatorship
Bill Belichick’s college football surprise is accidentally revealing
Sports heroes rarely go out on their own terms, and the same appears to be true for the coach who’s been arguably the most successful antihero in football. Yes, I’m talking about Bill Belichickwho led the New England Patriots through an epic two decades of NFL dominance. The 72-year-old Belichick, who wasn’t directly involved with a football team this season for the first time since 1975, has been hired to coach next year’s team at the University of North Carolina.
Belichick will be trying to make the transition from coaching pros who could be his sons to college players who could be his grandsons.
Belichick will be the oldest head coach at any major college football program in the country, and he will be trying to make the transition from coaching pros who could be his sons to college players who could be his grandsons. He’ll attempt this feat at an age when most Americans who can afford it are enjoying retirement — and as college football players have more power than they’ve ever had.
Irascible septuagenarian seeks career redemption by agreeing to lead entitled young men. What could possibly go wrong?
How about everything?
I won’t argue that The Hoodie, the nickname that Belichick’s preferred game-day ’fits earned him, has no shot at success in the college ranks. But I will argue that Belichick’s accepting a college coaching job is proof that he’s accepted that NFL owners don’t want him. Belichick wants an NFL job. With 333 wins in the regular season and the playoffs, he’s won the second-most games of any NFL coachsitting 14 games behind the 347 won by Don Shula. He could possibly catch or pass Shula with a couple of more seasons on an NFL sideline. What more proof do we need that Belichick’s time in the NFL is over than his losing coaching opportunities to far worse, albeit younger, coaches?
Belichick is rightly regarded by most as the GOAT among NFL head coaches. Even fans who still hold New England’s cheating controversies against him have to admit that nine Super Bowl appearances and six Super Bowl rings make him the best game planner and football disciplinarian we’ve seen. His former players swear by his approach, and the opposing NFL coaches he’s humbled almost never speak ill of him — at least not publicly.
However, Belichick’s past success didn’t guarantee NFL opportunities when he and the Patriots parted last season. ESPN reported that even Pats owner Robert Kraft told Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank not to hire him for their head coach opening. The Patriots deny this. What’s not up for debate is that for all his winning, Belichick also earned a relationship for being controlling — he was also the Patriots’ general manager — and for being a difficult boss and employee.
That perception still hasn’t faded in the NFL. The New Orleans Saints, the Chicago Bears and the New York Jets have already fired their head coaches, and the New York Giants, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Dallas Cowboys have head coaches who could be on the way out. It says something that a coach with Belichick’s incomparable rep would take a job at a 6-6 college program instead of waiting to see if an NFL team looking for a coach rings his phone.
Belichick saw the door closing, if not already locked, on an opportunity to resurrect his glorious NFL career.
Belichick saw the door closing, if not already locked, on an opportunity to resurrect his glorious NFL career, and UNC was happy to fling its doors open. The question is: Will Belichick like what he finds once he walks through it? (Other than, you know, the reported $10 million a year he’ll reportedly get and the royal status given to college football coaches, especially those in the South.)
College football bears little resemblance to the sport it purported itself to be for most of Belichick’s coaching career, and he’s likely to find himself out of step. After decades of totally exploiting the free labor of “amateur” student-athletes, the NCAA is years into the name-image-and-likeness era, which allows big-time athletes to sign seven-figure deals before they even step on campus. Belichick will have a reported $20 million in NIL cash at his disposal to help with recruiting, but therein lies the rub. He has to go out and recruit, which means he with the gruff and grouchy demeanor has to persuade teenagers to sign up for his fabled no-nonsense brand of coaching. The upside: If you want to go to the NFL, who better to teach you the game?
Sure, Belichick dealt with the NFL’s free-agency era just fine, but those players are under contracts collectively bargained by a union regarded as among the weakest in American pro sports. NFL players don’t have a transfer portal they can hop into when they don’t like their coaches.
The NFL has a salary cap and a trade deadline, which can make it hard for players to force their way out of uncomfortable situations. Those things don’t exist at the college level. Belichick could well find himself, like some other coaches have lamentedspending more time on recruiting and managing player relationships than on actual coaching. No one who knows anything about Belichick can imagine him enjoying that.
Another wrinkle is that when he was coaching the Patriots, Belichick had only one boss: Kraft. College football head coaches, especially those at public universities, have many masters. University presidents and athletic directors are part of a mix that also includes rich and powerful alumni boosters who are the ones who put the money in the NIL kitty to begin with. Then there are the public officials who have their own political interests (and sometimes those of taxpayers) to look out for.
NFL players don’t have a transfer portal they can hop into when they don’t like their coaches.
Kraft may have been able to coax Roger Goodell and the other NFL owners to make Spygate go away for the sake of “the Shield,” but imagine Belichick as a public employee, called to appear before a hearing of some North Carolina legislative subcommittee to talk about some aspect of his leadership of the Tar Heels.
Maybe the only thing that’s a bigger part of the Belichick mythos than the New England dynasty he helmed is the idea that he’s the die-hardest of football guys, that nothing that makes him feel more alive than X’s and O’s and the turf under his feet watching one of his masterful game plans unfold. At UNC, he’ll get another chance, maybe his last, to stand in that glory.
It’s just hard to imagine that this is the game plan the Hoodie drew up for himself.
Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere.
President Donald Trump is giving fragile U.S.-Iran diplomacy “some space” before deciding whether to resume strikes, United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz said Sunday.
Hours later, however, Trump posted images to social media depicting the U.S. attacking Iran.
Waltz also dismissed concerns over the United States’ diminished munitions stockpiles, even as he conceded that “a lot” of weapons have been depleted, which he said was because of the Russia-Ukraine war and fighting with the Houthis.
“I want to be crystal clear: The U.S. military — and I’ve verified this every which way — has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” Waltz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Waltz’s comments came on the second consecutive day of paused fighting between the United Sates and Iran amid reports of a dwindled U.S. stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors, among other munitions.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the depletion of interceptor stockpiles is among the reasons why the administration is wary of resuming major combat operations in a war launched without congressional authorization and which has grown exceedingly unpopular.
But Waltz underscored that the pause in fighting is to allow for an opportunity for peace — not because of an insufficient weapons supply, and warned that those leaking information to the press about the U.S. not having sufficient weaponry “deserve to be in jail.”
“What the president is doing right now, as we’ve seen all along, is giving some talks some space. Talks are ongoing,” Waltz told NBC. “They’re happening at every level, from the more technical aspect of it all the way to the highest levels, of course, within both the Iranian government and the U.S. government.”
He reiterated in an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that Trump “is giving diplomacy a chance.”
But even after Waltz publicly touted giving peace a chance, Trump posted several AI-generated images on Truth Social Sunday afternoon depicting the U.S. striking Kharg Island. In one imageTrump is standing on the deck of an Iranian oil tanker with an American flag in hand.
Trump met with top aides on Friday to weigh escalating military action against Iran, according to a senior White House official. On Saturday, the president told a French journalist that he is “absolutely” considering resuming full-scale war with Iran if the U.S. doesn’t “get 100% of what we want.”
Waltz declined to give a timeline for when the war would end.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that if Iran plays any role in attacking Israel, it would be making a “terrible mistake” and that the response would be “very forceful.”
“If Iran attacks Israel – either directly or through proxies, either with ballistic missiles or UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]’s or killer drones — it will make a terrible mistake,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”“Because our response, Israel’s response, will be very, very forceful.”
Netanyahu, who launched the war with Iran jointly with Trump on Feb. 28, is set to meet with his U.S. counterpart at the White House on Tuesday, the same day he’s scheduled to attend the funeral of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Jake Traylor and Emily Hung contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
BERLIN (AP) — The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attackthat left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of the city, authorities said.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack. They returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” they said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
Suspect convicted of ties to Islamic extremism
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said Sunday.
There, he made contact with several people who were presumed members of the militant group — or at least he believed them to be, prosecutors said. He was arrested in Lebanon last year and sentenced by a military court to three months’ imprisonment for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.
He returned to Germany after completing his sentence, where he was arrested at the Berlin airport.
In May, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, as well as publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account and other charges, prosecutors said.
The court handed down a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors have appealed.
The court said it took Ballout’s months of pre-trial detention in Germany and Lebanon into account. It also said it considered that Ballout had confessed to the crimes, appeared to distance himself from the militant group and no actual threat had ever materialized.
He was released from detention pending the appeal.
Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations
According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festivalknown as Christopher Street Daywas ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.
The attack did not occur at the festival, along its route or at the closing party. Rather, the violence took place a few hundred meters (yards) away on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors.
Police said a woman was killed.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the iconic gate. They hugged each other and laid down flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one that said: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+celebrations.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed that law enforcement would find the suspect.
“I would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don’t let yourselves, let us not let ourselves, be intimidated,” he said. “These acts have only one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away from us the most important thing we have: Namely our openness and our freedom.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary significantly strengthened.
Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck into a Christmas marketkilling 13 people and injuring dozens. He was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, an attack that saw a Syrian man convicted in March and sentencedto 13 years.
This week, Amsterdam will be hosting World Pride alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers “are closely monitoring the security situation” after the Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the way of celebrating freedom and love.
Katy Perry lambasted the Trump administration over the weekend for using her song “Firework” in one of its social media videos about U.S airstrikes on Iran.
The pop star said she was “deeply appalled and angry” over the use of her song in a White House TikTok video featuring bombs exploding set to Perry’s 2010 hit — specifically featuring her lyrics “boom, boom, boom.” A caption on the video, which has more than 6 million views, reads: “Iran has been warned.”
“I did not approve this, I was not asked, and I absolutely do not condone it. I wrote this song to be an anthem of hope, healing, and inner strength for people going through their darkest personal moments,” Perry wrote in an X post on Saturday. “To see a message of self-worth and upliftment weaponized to soundtrack destruction and violence is a complete violation of everything my song stands for. My music is for bringing people together, not celebrating warfare.”
White House aide Kaelan Dorr responded to Perry, saying“This you?” He posted Perry’s own military-themed music video of her song “Part of Me,” in which she’s dressed in combat uniform.
Perry, who is in a romantic relationship with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is among many other prominent artists who have rebuked the Trump administration for using their music in videos on official accounts.
Kesha publicly admonished President Donald Trump’s administration in March after the official White House TikTok account used her song “Blow” in another video about military action. “Stop using my music, perverts,” she said on X.
The Filipino American pop star Olivia Rodrigo expressed outrage at the Trump administration after it used her song “All-American Bitch” last fall in a video threatening deportations. She responded to the Department of Homeland Security at the time, saying, “Don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”
While the video is still visible, Rodrigo’s music has been removed.
And last December, Sabrina Carpenter condemned the administration for using her song “Juno” in a video about immigration arrests, which she called “evil and disgusting.”
“Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda,” the singer wrote at the time.
Ariana Grandealso posted on her Instagram story last September criticizing the administration over its immigration policyanti-LGBTQ+ messaging and alleged censorship. In response, White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai told her, “Save your tears,” a reference to one of her songs. Last month, after the White House used her song “Bye” in an anti-immigration video on TikTok, she commented“Please do not ever use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense.”
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Taylor Swift. The White House poked fun at the mega star earlier this month when shemarried Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden. Its official X account posted photo-shopped images of the venue’s billboards blaring, “TRUMP IS YOUR PRESIDENT.” After she endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election, Trump wrote, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Last year, Trump went after Bruce Springsteenfor insulting the president at a concert in Manchester, England, where the Boss called the administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.” Trump called the Grammy-award winning artist “highly overrated,” writing in part, “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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