UNC Football Bowl Projections: Odds For Tar Heels’ 2025-26 Bowl Game

A bold new era of North Carolina Tar Heels football is finally on the horizon, as 73-year-old head coach Bill Belichick is returning to the sidelines in Chapel Hill intent on recreating the glory days he achieved with the New England Patriots at the NCAA level.  

While we’ll know more about Belichick’s success across North Carolina sports betting in a few months, for now it’s time to take a look forward at what awaits the Tar Heels this fall, which got us at BetCarolina.com thinking about where UNC might go this bowl season. 

With that in mind, BetCarolina.com created some hypothetical odds on which postseason contest the ‘Heels will compete in, with potential stops in Orlando, Boston, Charlotte, The Bronx and Jacksonville leading the way out of the gate.  

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UNC Football Bowl Projections: Odds For Tar Heels’ 2025-26 Bowl Game

Operators like bet365 North Carolina Sportsbook will have odds on the Heels all season long, and futures as well throughout the college football season.

Where Tar Heels Might Go For Bowl

While Belichick’s future in Chapel Hill is still a mystery, we do know that oddsmakers from DraftKings Sportsbook North Carolina have UNC +4000 to win the ACC in 2025, ranking ninth out of 18 teams in the expanded conference this football season.  

As for where UNC might go this bowl season, there’s a good shot that the Tar Heels might be headed to a location that the program’s quite familiar with, with spots like the Pop-Tart Bowl in Orlando (+425), Boston’s Wasabi Fenway Bowl (+475), Charlotte’s Duke’s Mayo Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl (+550 apiece) leading the list of potential landing spots for Belichick in Year One with the ‘Heels.  

North Carolina is quite familiar with most of those contests, having played in the Fenway Bowl in 2024 (losing to UConn, 27-14) and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl in 2023 (losing to West Virginia, 30-10) and in 2021 (losing to South Carolina, 38-21). At Fenway of course, we'd expect a heavy contingent of Pats fans in support, even if it means Belichick's Heels won only 7 games or so.

While the Tar Heels have never played in the Pinstripe Bowl, they are familiar with the longest of long shot bowl destinations (that being the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl, at +600), as UNC has played in the Jacksonville contest seven times between 1963 and 1997, going 5-2 in those games.  

Since 2008, UNC has played in 14 bowl games, going 3-11 overall, with five straight losses dating back to the 2020 Orange Bowl, with the Heels’ last postseason victory coming in the 2019 Military Bowl, when then-head coach Mack Brown led the program to a 55-13 shellacking of Temple to cap off a 7-6 season.  

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UNC Bowl Game History

As stated above, North Carolina’s recent bowl game history has been anything but pretty, with five straight postseason contests ending in defeat since 2020, with a total score of 164-99 in those contests, with only one of the five being decided by less than 10 points (that being a 28-27 loss to Oregon in the 2022 Holiday Bowl).  

Given the Tar Heels’ 3-11 bowl game record over the last 16 seasons, it might not be a bad idea to start anew in Chapel Hill, which is exactly what the program’s six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach will seek to do this fall, beginning with UNC’s Week 1 showdown against TCU at Kenan Stadium on Sept. 1.  

While Tar Heels fans await a destination to make their bowl travel plans, check out our guide to college football betting in North Carolina at BetCarolina.com.

USA Today photo by Bob Donnan.

Author

Christopher Boan

@cgboan

Christopher Boan is a lead writer at BetCarolina.com specializing in covering state issues. He has covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.