North Carolina Football Coach Bill Belichick hasn't met with the local media since his introductory press conference December 12.

He has done weekly spots on ESPN's "Pat McAfee Show" and some other ESPN programming. But nothing local until earlier this past week, sort of.

Belichick didn't meet with the media but did do the "Carolina Insider Podcast" hosted by UNC Radio play-by-play man Jones Angell and anayst and GoHeels.com lead writer Adam Lucas.

The podcast runs on the school's official website, so it's an in-house production. The questions, and the new UNC coach's responses were interesting, as he's two months in and less than a month from spring practice.

Here is the transcript from Belichick's interview:

Q: This has been a whirlwind it feels like. What have these last couple of months been like as you’ve gotten your feet on the ground and gotten going with Carolina football?

BELICHICK: “It’s been great, pulling together a staff, recruiting some of the high school players for the ‘25 as well as ‘26 class and finishing off the ‘25 class with some transfer players, but also some players who didn’t have a position in college that were available. So a combination of all those things have kept us pretty busy, but we’re pulling together and day-by-day it’s getting a little bit tighter.”

Q: December and January are crazy months in college football with the portal and signing day… With everything having to happen so quickly, how have you tried to manage that, how have you tried to get your message across in such a compressed timeline?

BELICHICK: “I’ve had a lot of people working with us here [and] we’ve tried to do the best we can. We’re certainly behind, but we’re catching up. The model here is [a] general manager, head coach model [with] Mike Lombardi. Mike is going to be handling most of the personnel acquisition, negotiations and so forth and evaluations. I’ve been part of that with some coaches, but we haven’t really had a full staff until recently. He’s handled the bulk of that with some of the people he’s hired on the personnel side of it.

"Our coaches have met with the team and we’re getting started on that and the offseason program and our workouts. We’re continuing to work on the ‘26 class and this is an important time in the spring and early summer months to try and get some of that nailed down. We know we have a second portal window coming up as well so just trying to balance all of those things, but it’s great to have Mike and his staff working on the personnel end of it because, I don’t want to say it’s half of it, but it’s certainly another major component as the acquisition of players, wherever they come from, high school or transfer while we work with the team that’s here.”

Q: As you have gotten to know Carolina [and] Carolina has gotten to know you. What kind of impressions have you gotten of just the excitement level from Carolina fans and students and football fans about the upcoming era for Tar Heel football?

BELICHICK: “It’s been great. The reception’s been great from all levels. The student body at a couple of basketball games, and those type of things. They seemed pretty happy about the pizza. The players have been great. They’re working extremely hard trying to get better and doing the things we’ve asked them to. Lee Roberts and the administration have been great in terms of the transition and the alumni from the Rams Club to many of the football alumni, (Lawrence) Taylor and (Julius) Peppers and Harris Barton and Jeff Saturday, I could go on and on. [They’ve] been great.

"A lot of support and pretty much throwing out the red carpet for whatever we need with some of our alumni and key supporters have been great as well. It’s been fantastic on support and we’re trying to get to as many people as we can to try to build not only a football team, but to support the entire athletic program here at Carolina, which we’ve tried to do with some of our food service down to the Blue Zone and also in terms of facilities in terms of whatever some of the spring teams need, we work with them.

"Chancellor Roberts had a reception for us to meet all of the other coaches the first week we were here. That was really a great event so we could connect as a department and work with Bubba (Cunningham) and the rest of the sports.”

Q: I think when you took the job people said Coach Belichick’s not going to recruit, he’s not going to get out there to schools and stuff, we see pictures all of the time with recruits and with prospects in their high schools. What have you enjoyed about that process? What’s that process been like for you?

BELICHICK: “It’s a little different than what I did with draft prospects because there’s a draft element, but we also recruited a lot of players who weren’t drafted, guys like David Andrews, who’s the starting center for the Patriots for the last nine years that Mike and i recruited out of Georgia as an undrafted free agent. There was an element of that in the NFL and I’ve been very impressed with all of the people that I’ve come in contact with.

"The high school coaches, both in and out of state, do a great job with their programs and players and accommodating us. I would say they’ve been very excited to see us and our presence in a lot of these schools that have evidently, as they’ve said, hasn’t been that strong recently. We’ve kind of pretty much been up and down the eastern seaboard and many places from Chicago to Nashville to the midwest, even though we’re recruiting nationally in Texas and California as well. I personally haven’t probably gotten past the Mississippi (River), but we’ve hit as many spots as we could during the timeframe that was allotted. We want to be a national school, and we are a national school.

"This is a national brand and everybody wants to go to Carolina and it’s very difficult to get acceptance into the school as an out of state student, but as a student athlete there’s a better path there so we’ve had tremendous interest nationally from student-athletes interested in the programs and so we’re everywhere. We want to hit North Carolina hard because it’s the most important state, but we also want to have a national presence for student athletes that want to come here.”

Q: We’re coming up on another segment of the calendar with spring football. What’s the planning been like for that and what are the goals during that part of the calendar?

BELICHICK: “The first goal is in the offseason program to make sure the team is ready for spring football so that’s the process we're in right now. The first thing to be will evaluate the team we actually have. Once we start working with people, you get a better idea of what they can do and what they’re good at and how to utilize their skills. The next thing to do will be to teach them what our fundamentals and techniques and scheme is so that they can build their way into it. We have a lot of work to do, both of us, as players and coaches.

"We need to know them, earn their trust and they need to do the same with the coaching staff and their teammates. That’s really what spring football is about. It’s about evaluating the team, trying to building the team, put people in the best position possible, and honestly earn each other’s trust because we’re going to be in it for a long time so we’re going to have to count on each other, players, coaches, teammates. It’ll be a team first attitude and it’ll take awhile to be that, but that’s where we’re headed.”

Q: You’ve achieved about all there is to achieve in professional football. What is it about college football that is interesting to you, excites you and college football at North Carolina that is exciting to you?

BELICHICK: “The number one thing is the school [and] the brand what Carolina stands for. I think everyone knows where I was young I was in Chapel Hill with my dad and then he spent the rest of his career at the Naval Academy, but Carolina’s always been a little special place. When I was with the Giants, I had (Lawrence) Taylor for ten years there, from 1981-1990. I heard plenty about Carolina from LT and the pride and the success that they had when he was here, when they won the ACC Championship. He had a lot of great players around him. Of course one of his closest friends is Michael Jordan, so that was another good connection. Michael’s been great, super supportive since I came to Chapel Hill. Carolina is a special place and so I;m happy to be here and looking forward to working with everybody and doing the best I can here for the university and the football program.”

Q: What is the North Carolina brand? You’ve been around the country and see every single brand that there is. When people say North Carolina and/or North Carolina football, what is that?

BELICHICK: “I’d say North Carolina as a university [has] high academics, they have a strong presence in business throughout the country and particularly in the south and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Their business program is great, they have a great medical program. The academics are outstanding. It’s a classy school that;s been a strong, maybe and probably the strongest member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for a long, long, long time. I think that’s what their brand is. They’re an ACC team that’s a great academic team and won multiple national championships in many sports. I’ve had a lot of great players here. I would say the football team, especially the last 40 years, has probably been less than what everybody has hoped for and hopefully we’ll change that.”

Q: What is the difference in your mind between working with someone [who plays football for a living] and an 18-22 year old who is in a different part of his life?

BELICHICK: “He’s younger, but the life is really the same. Players that come into college football now are professionals. They’re monetized, they’re compensated, they pay taxes, they have to get insurance, they have to deal with credit. They have legal documents [and] they have things that they didn’t have five to ten, however many years ago. College football has changed and so I think you can see many other schools having a model that’s similar to what we have [with] a general manager-head coach model.

"You see that in many basketball programs in college and also you know now in football. That’s what it is. It’s pro football on a much monetarily smaller scale in terms of what each individual school is spending. These kids are being paid to play and that’s what college football is now. It’s not pro football, but it’s pretty close.I don’t really see too much difference in the overall model other than the ages of the players and their development and obviously things like spring practice and recruiting and all of that are a little bit different. There are a lot more similarities than there are differences at this point in time. I wouldn’t have said that five years ago.”

Q: You talked some about Michael Lombardi building the roster and you guys trying to find players this late in the time period. What are some things that are important to you when you’re looking for a player that you want to identify as someone who can play and be successful for a Bill Belichick team?

BELICHICK: “Players who are tough, smart, dependable, [and] good teammates. That’s probably where we start.”

Q: What makes a good teammate?

BELICHICK: “A good teammate is somebody you can trust and count on every day. Somebody who is tough, smart, and dependable. That’s what a good teammate is whether that’s in football or in life or in business or in anything else. There are going to be ups and downs, but mental toughness is part of dealing with things when they’re not perfect, which they’re not always going to be perfect. You always want people that make smart decisions. Not saying the smartest player has to be the best football player, but they have to make smart decisions for the football team. You have to be dependable and that means being consistent. All Division I athletes, just like all NFL players, are capable of having a big play, a splash play there.

"They have enough talent for that or they wouldn’t be a Division I athlete or NFL players. The good ones are the ones that can do it over a consistent timeframe and are dependable day in and day out, week in and week out. That’s really what successful people in life do. They show up and [are] productive every day, not once a week or every once in a while. They have that dependability on a consistent basis. That’s what we need to do as a staff, we need to earn that trust and respect from our players and that’s what our players need to do for each other and [for their] teammates, is they need to earn that on their daily performance that emphasizes the team first and that they can do their job productively so that we can all count on them to perform that in critical situations and in times [of] stress [on] Saturday afternoon.”

Q: What’s the key in that consistency [that you had in New England] compared to just having a splash season or one great year?

BELICHICK: “I think that consistency is day after day. Forget about having a great season, let’s just have a great day, and then another one and then let’s have another one. Let’s string a good week together and then let’s string two good weeks together and then let’s string three good weeks together. That’s how you develop consistency. I think talking about years and all that really is, there’s nothing we can do about November. There’s nothing we can do about December. Honestly, there’s not too much we can do about August. We can have a good day today, we can have a good week. We can prepare ourselves better for next week and in a couple of weeks we’ll be better prepared to go to spring ball. I think our short term focus as a football team is just that.

"It’s very short term and it’s on today and let’s not worry too much into the future and miss our opportunity to have a good day today. Now, as an organization, Mike, myself we have to look ahead. We have to recruit for ‘26, we have to look at ‘27. We’re gonna have a football team here in ‘27 and ‘28. It’s not like we’re gonna go out of business so we have to plan for that. For this football team that’s here right now, players that are here and coaches, we’re heavily dedicated towards how we can be productive this day, this week and then we’ll worry about next week when we get to next week. We’ll see how much progress we make this week and we might have to double back on some things or maybe there will be some things that we feel good about where we’re at and we can move ahead. We won’t know that until we go through it.”

Q: It feels like some coaches become known as offensive coaches or defensive coaches. You haven’t really been pigeonholed as one or the other. Why is that important to your career and what you’ve been able to accomplish?

BELICHICK: “Because I want to be the coach of the whole team. I don’t want to be the offensive coordinator or the defensive coordinator. I’ve done all those jobs. I’ve coached and have been a position coach on offense. I’ve been a position coach on defense. I’ve been a special teams coordinator. For the first eight years I was in the league, I was involved in special teams. I’ve drafted players, I’ve traded players, been involved in contracts.

"I think every part of the program is important and if you want to have a championship program then you want every part of the program to be at a championship level, whether that’s strength and conditioning, whether it’s nutrition, whether it’s the offensive line, the punt return team, your goal line defense. So, I’m responsible for all of it and I want to oversee all of it. If I feel like I need or want to get in and coach and help that area then I wanna do whatever I can to help the team. That’s really, in my career, I would say I’ve done all of those jobs. I’ve been in the equipment room, I’ve filmed practices. I’ve set up bags, I’ve gone to the airport and picked up film and stuff like that back in the day when it wasn’t done electronically. I feel like I’ve done all of those jobs. They’re all important and you need everybody to be good at their job to have a successful team.

"It’s important for me to emphasize and stress and I don’t want to say oversee them, but make sure that they all run together smoothly so that we as a team can be successful and not get hung up on something that is working [and] get derailed by something that isn’t working.”

Q: What are some of the details that the current team might not realize are important, but over these next few months they’re going to realize those details are important to building a championship team?

BELICHICK: “Everything is important. For the players, it starts with conditioning. That’s the number one thing for a player is to be in good football condition, whether that’s strong, explosive, fast as well as having competitive endurance. That’s their job to be in condition. I can’t do that for them, neither can anybody else. There’s not a pill they can take. That comes from hard work. Conditioning is a big part of it [and] knowing their assignment is a big part of it and knowing how to do their assignment is the other big thing for a player. So, being conditioned, knowing what to do, and knowing how to do it, without those three things, he really doesn’t have a chance to be very successful in a good program.”