For the better part of 18 months, UNC officials have come to terms with the stark reality of the evolving intercollegiate athletic landscape. Despite a rich basketball history built on Tobacco Road and intertwined with an Atlantic Coast Conference that was once the nation’s preeminent basketball league, football is the bridge to the future for the athletic department as a whole.

Those officials, including Board of Trustees chair John Preyer and former chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, have been vocal in stressing the need for a greater commitment to football in recent years, and those words took action last month as UNC made a substantial, paradigm-shaking investment in its football program with the hiring of Bill Belichick. Chancellor Lee Roberts was instrumental in finalizing the deal that brought Belichick to Chapel Hill last month, according to sources.

On Friday, Roberts went to bat for the football program in the most unlikely of places: the UNC Faculty Council meeting.

“College athletics are changing dramatically, and the importance of football is only increasing and will continue to increase,” Roberts said. “All of our peer institutions are investing in football very aggressively.”

Roberts, who shed his interim tag in August, highlighted California, UCLA, Michigan, Texas and Virginia as UNC’s peers, each of which are robust academic universities that reside in Power 4 conferences. He noted that UCLA, Michigan and Texas all spend significantly more on football than UNC does, while adding that Cal and Virginia, as fellow ACC members, spend similar amounts and are trying to figure out how to spend more.

UNC’s football program generated $66.9 million in revenue and a $26.8 million surplus in 2023-24, according to the university’s annual financial report to the NCAA. That represents 40.7 percent of the athletic department’s record $164.5 million in total revenue. UNC spent $18.3 million on coaching and support staff salaries in 2023-24, a total that will significantly increase with the Belichick hire.

“We’re going to continue to invest in our football program,” Roberts said. “We started playing football here in 1888. Our football program’s older than most of our academic departments, and we’re going to continue to make that a priority in the context of our overall athletics budget.”

Roberts stressed that money spent on football isn’t available for other university priorities, as the two primary revenue sources – booster donations and the ESPN media contract payout through ACC distributions – are earmarked specifically for athletics.

When a faculty member raised a question about the money being spent on football when other academic positions are poorly funded, Roberts recalled Dean Smith’s comments on athletics serving as the front porch of the university.

“If you go all over the world, and I’m sure most of you have seen this first-hand, you’ll see people wearing our colors and our logo and they’re doing that mostly because of our sports teams, not because of our political science department,” Roberts said. “It’s a fact of the world we live in.”

It may be an uncomfortable truth, but athletic financials have surged over the past 25 years due to the influx of media money. In 2000, the ACC handed out the largest per-school distribution among all conferences at $8.1 million, according to research by The Birmingham News. Current projections indicate that both the SEC and the Big Ten will surpass the $100 million mark in conference distributions by the end of the decade, thereby creating a potential $35-45 million revenue gap with ACC schools, including UNC.

While UNC continues to work behind the scenes in determining its best path forward with regard to conference affiliation, according to sources, any potential jump to the SEC or the Big Ten would require a substantial investment in football. There’s no time like the present to chart a course for the future. Rallying boosters and diehard fans may be simple enough, but engaging and convincing the academic community presents a challenge, which is why Roberts’ comments on Friday are noteworthy.

Rival fanbases have long basked in the wine and cheese crowd moniker that Florida State’s Sam Cassell bestowed on the Smith Center crowd 34 years ago, although what they may be reluctant to acknowledge is that the UNC fan base travels as well as any fan base in the country. There is a deep passion for Carolina sports that has been passed down from generation to generation, and within it a sense of pride for the university’s academic excellence paired with its athletic accolades.

Even so, there has been significant tension on UNC’s campus about the role of athletics dating back to UNC system president Bill Friday’s decision to shut down the Dixie Classic holiday basketball tournament in 1961 following a point-shaving scandal. In his announcement, Friday said that the event “exemplified the exploitation for public entertainment or for budgetary and commercial preferences of a sports program which properly exists as an adjunct for collegiate education.”

In 1984, as fundraising efforts for the Student Activities Center – which would later become the Dean E. Smith Center – drew to a close, there was a renewed ire in the relationship between academics and athletics, with some suggesting that excess private funding should be allocated to academic needs despite the university’s refusal to include the basketball arena project in the Carolina Challenge Campaign fundraising drive in the years prior.

More recently, the football program was scapegoated during the outset of the NCAA’s investigation into academic irregularities with the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department. The years-long inquiry determined that at least 3,100 students had made use of irregular independent study courses over an 18-year span, which ultimately led to the university being placed on academic probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accrediting agency. The athletic department was ultimately cleared in the matter by the NCAA Committee on Infractions in 2017.

Those frictions have led to cautious interactions with faculty leaders over the years in meetings such as these, where athletics’ standing lacks the weight that it carries in more public settings. Roberts is a business man who lacks the institutional background that defined many of his predecessors, and it’s his ability to view the university’s academic-athletic relationship from a fresh perspective that has allowed UNC to take a significant step forward in its commitment to athletic excellence while at the same defending those actions to faculty and staff who may disagree.

Football is now king in college athletics, and for the first time in the modern era of Carolina athletics, UNC’s administration is not only acknowledging that development but embracing it as well.