Bill Belichick usually doesn’t do media stuff if he doesn’t have to, but he made an exception recently.

‘The 33rd Team’ is made up of former NFL players, coaches and staffers, so Belichick was on a podcast of theirs recently talking about a number of things. At the end of the 20-ish minute session, Belichick was asked what he’d be doing if he hadn’t become a football coach.

The answer may surprise you.

“Back in the day when my dad went to Navy, I think he was making about $4,500 and there wasn’t a lot of money in coaching football,” he said. “There was other reasons why you got into coaching and playing, for that matter, too. Salaries weren’t really big either. I remember my first year with the Colts in ’95, my salary was $19,000. So, it’s a long way from where it was. I thought I would be going into business, so I majored in economics in college and I had a graduate assistant position lined up at NC State in 1975 and I was going to head down there and work for Lou Holtz at NC State.

“June of ’75 was when Title IX was passed, so the openings Coach Holtz had were reallocated to women in the athletic department. So, I never got to that Masters in Economics, never got into the business world and Coach Holtz was the first coach to hire me and he was the first coach to fire me. I never stepped foot on the NC State campus. I ended up with the Colts that year. I guess I would have been in some kind of business.”

Obviously, Bill Belichick the head coach has worked out pretty well, but it’s always wild to hear how folks get started in certain careers. It’s mind blowing to think about so many different things falling into place to lead us all down the road we end up going. Bill Belichick may have never ended up in Foxborough for going on 24 years as HC of the NEP if he had decided to leave coaching after the NC State gig didn’t work out.