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And after his six Super Bowl victories with the New England Patriots, his gruffness would melt into a grinning pool of satisfaction. 

Belichick fell behind Sunday. In his first game as the head coach of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, Belichick’s team lost 48-14 to the unranked TCU Horned Frogs. The Tar Heels scored a touchdown on their opening drive, and then TCU scored 41 consecutive points, and Michael Jordan’s private plane was tracked leaving Chapel Hill in the third quarter. It was a kaleidoscope of humiliation.

Belichick’s sojourn to college football was always odd, with troubling signs, but the bedrock assumption was simple: Even at 73 years old, he is Bill Belichick. He is the greatest football coach in history, the genius, a high priest of the game.

Yes, Belichick was an NFL-only-guy, and his Patriots largely fell apart after Tom Brady left. Also, the NCAA is so volatile that Nick Saban, the Belichick of the college game who once worked with Belichick in Cleveland, left Alabama last year for broadcasting, citing the power imbalance with players, among other things. Saban, 72, is one year younger than Bill.

But Belichick wouldn’t set himself up to fail, would he? North Carolina has been a study in football mediocrity and they paid up to get him, and there was no shortage of ambition. Belichick pushed a new motto for the program: the NFL’s 33rd team, with a pro approach. There were well-sourced stories written about North Carolina’s frenetic, “Silicon Valley-style” attempt to break and remake Carolina football, amid the NCAA’s complex rule book, but even in there Belichick’s celebrity seemed like a genuine asset.

There was also his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who seemed to exert an odd level of influence over Belichick’s various enterprises. (This was best investigated by the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” which has explored of the relationship.) It sometimes evoked a whiff of Shakespearean tragedy: Belichick has always exerted a ruthless, peerless level of control over everything he touches, and surrendering control to a 24-year-old former beauty pageant third-place finisher with avaricious instincts only works if the football team is good.

And then the hype built, and built. UNC luminaries were in attendance Sunday: Jordan, Roy Williams, Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm, along with Randy Moss and Yankees manager Aaron Boone. Belichick brought in 70 new players and kept so much secret, up to and including his depth chart for the game. Three of the four panellists on ESPN, including former Patriot Tedy Bruschi and Belichick friend Pat McAfee, picked the Tar Heels to win. It was a national broadcast.

Then TCU ran the college-famous-but-almost-bog-standard Air Raid offence, which typically has about three run plays in the playbook, and ran 35 times for 258 yards. North Carolina went over two hours of real time without completing a pass, and at one point ESPN put a dog in the booth, and Belichick’s post-game press conference was surrounded by sorority-style rush week balloons. The talent gap was a canyon.

And the internet , in a way that it couldn’t quite manage with the Patriots, and you have to think that if Belichick didn’t see it, Hudson probably did. 

Listen, there’s time. Belichick will presumably grind Air Raid tape, and will try to get out ahead of the curve again. Maybe this season is rough but there are blue-chip recruits coming, next year, in theory. The Patriots weren’t just Brady, no matter how it looks, and as a coach, Bill Belichick figures things out.

But it might not be about the coaching so much as about the players. In the NFL, Belichick could just draft guys, and keep them or not. In the NCAA they have a choice, and can change their minds.

Which makes how he handles this season more important. Belichick will have to attract talent with his celebrity, his gravitas, his stature, his history. He can’t be a punchline, and he can’t be a joke.

Because otherwise it might matter that he became too insulated and ever more stubborn and lost his touch on player evaluation at the end, and that he couldn’t get another NFL job and backed into being Chapel Bill, and that he put two of his sons on the coaching staff, plus the son of his longtime confidante and UNC GM Michael Lombardi.

The hype could easily become the story of a great coach who got lost in the raging river of modern college football.

It’s on the table now. It’s just one game but it’s fair to wonder, for the 73-year-old version of Bill Belichick, whether this is all there is.