Bill Belichick's Arrival at UNC Headlines NFL's Sideline Influence in The ACC

The group of roughly 60 reporters had crowded around the table Thursday long before Bill Belichick arrived to take questions in his first run through ACC preseason media days as North Carolina's football coach.

Some massed at each end, multiple rows deep. Others filled rows of chairs positioned in the middle, in front of a platform filled with video cameras on tripods to capture the words of the man who led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles.

"It’s Bill Belichick — of course everybody's going to circle him up and try to ask him as many questions as possible," UNC linebacker Thaddeus Dixon said with a chuckle from his own nearby table, adding: "He's got so much aura."

It was a sign of how Belichick draws a watch-his-every-step crowd as he gears up for his first season as a college football coach. Yet, he's also the headliner for a larger pro influence that has arrived in the ACC, with the league boasting three former NFL head coaches — the most of any conference — just as the dawn of the revenue-sharing era is making the college ranks look more like the pros than ever before.

He joins Boston College's Bill O’Brien, the former Houston Texans head coach who also worked as a Belichick assistant in the NFL. And there's former Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers head coach Frank Reich, who is leading Stanford as an interim coach this season.

O'Brien is in his second year with the Eagles and was previously head coach at Penn State. Reich took over in the spring after the firing of Troy Taylor for off-field concerns, coming after a call from former player-turned-Stanford general manager Andrew Luck for what he has described as a one-year move.

Then there's Belichick, the NFL lifer who "always wanted" to give