TCU football coach says it’s ‘hard to game-plan’ for Bill Belichick’s UNC debut
TCU will play in one of the nation’s most anticipated games of the first week of college football when the Horned Frogs face off with North Carolina and first-time college head coach Bill Belichick.
Belichick’s move to the Tar Heels — after winning six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots — rocked the college football world. TCU head coach Sonny Dykes talked Wednesday about the unique challenges of facing the coach in his first game.
“Hard to game-plan. I mean, we don’t have really much of an idea exactly what we’re going to see ... you know?” Dykes said. “It’s not easy, but that’s kind of the first game, and particularly when you’ve got a new coaching staff on top of that, and then you also have a coach that’s transitioning from the NFL to college football. So there’s a lot of unknowns.”
The game is scheduled for 7 p.m. Monday at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and will be broadcast on ESPN.
The matchup is reminiscent of TCU’s 2023 matchup with Colorado — a game against a high-profile coach, Deion Sanders, in his first game trying to lead a program back to national relevance. The Horned Frogs lost 45-42.
Dykes reflected on that experience and how it has affected the North Carolina game.
“I think we’ve taken a little bit of a different approach as coaches for sure,” he said. “One thing that happened that year was we had a lot of new faces, too. We were trying to instill our culture, because we had had kind of a senior group in '22, and then we lost, I think, seven juniors to the NFL draft. And so we got two real classes of players, really recruiting classes, kind of moved on.
“We felt like we weren’t as far along as a team and as a program and as a culture, quite frankly, as we needed to be, and so, you know, I think all of us coaches were certainly concerned. ... We didn’t do as good a job of getting the guys’ attention, probably, as we should have.”
Team captain Devean Deal, in his second season with TCU after transferring from Tulane, discussed how the team can avoid getting caught up in the distractions.
“I feel like up until the game, you feel the crowd and everything, but I always feel like once we step across that line, we know it’s just us 11,” Deal said. “So, like, that’s how we attack the preparation, to just make sure that we focus on what we can do. But all that, just to me, is just energy, and you can feed off of it, or you can let it distract you, and then pull your attention places where it shouldn’t be.”
The prime-time matchup is the only college football game on Monday and will put a national spotlight on TCU’s program. Dykes talked about how, despite the usefulness of such exposure, winning still provides the best attention.
“They’re big. I mean, they’re big,” Dykes said. “I think I’ve always just been a believer that the most important thing is just to win football games. I think people, sometimes, you just force them to notice you and pay attention to you. There’s artificial ways to generate that stuff. I prefer the winning way, and if you can win consistently, then people will take note.”
TCU ended last season going 6-1 in its final seven games, including a win over Louisiana in the New Mexico Bowl. Junior quarterback Josh Hoover explained what the offense needs to do for that momentum to carry over into this season.
“Toward the end of year, we started running the ball really well,” Hoover said. “So just finding runs that are good for us and good productive plays on the ground, and then just throwing the ball around. Getting guys the ball we need to touch it, making sure everybody’s get their touches and allow those guys to make plays with ball ... and I think we’ll like what we see.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2025 at 5:13 PM.
