The Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson story is all about power

And they're being reckless with the futures of football players at UNC

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If you subscribe to this newsletter, it’s highly likely that you are aware of Jordon Hudson. She is the 24-year-old girlfriend of former Patriots coach and current coach at the University of North Carolina, Bill Belichick.

“Girlfriend” is perhaps now the wrong term — she appears to be his publicist, business affairs manager, potential fiancée, and the reason that everyone keeps texting me saying, “what on god’s green earth is going on with Bill Belichick.”

My co-host Madeline Hill and I first started following this story for The Sports Gossip Show six months ago (here’s our complete timeline of their relationship). The story started out as a strange fascination, but it’s become something much darker. Something that could actually effect the careers of football players and staff at UNC.

When Belichick joined Instagram, Madeline and I had a hunch that Hudson was behind it. Why else would the gruff, media-hating, attention-diverting, “we’re on to Cincinnati” football coach willingly create an account at the age of 73? When he had, for many years, mocked social media by calling any form of it “Instaface?”

This past weekend, we got something close to proof: During a disastrous interview with CBS New Sunday Morning, the interviewer, Tony Dokoupil, asked Bill how he deals with outside noise about social media.

Bill said, “Yes, so, I’m on some of those social media platforms but I honestly don’t follow.” We took this to mean that this man might not have any idea what Hudson is posting to his hundreds of thousands of followers. He could very well not have the passwords to his own accounts.

Hudson also — famously, now — interrupted the interview to say, “We’re not talking about this,” when Dokoupil asked how the two met.

If you haven’t seen the CBS interview (or don’t have it memorized, like I unfortunately do), go watch it. CBS said in the piece that Hudson was a “constant presence,” and Pro Football Talk reported that Hudson not only interrupted that one time, but was constantly cutting in and even stormed off set at one point, expecting Belichick to follow her.

Page Six reports that Belichick’s inner circle is concerned that Hudson has infiltrated every aspect of his life, and The Athletic published a great piece about how Hudson is the reason a deal fell apart to film the reality show Hard Knocks at UNC. Hudson is cc’ed on all of Belichick’s emails, and she posted some cryptic Instagram yesterday saying that a “statement would be coming later.” Belichick’s literary agency later did put out a statement on Instagram that read very much like something Hudson would have dictated.

Belichick released a statement through UNC about the CBS interview today, saying he made it clear to CBS that his personal life was off limits:

Unfortunately, that expectation was not honored during the interview. I was surprised when unrelated topics were introduced, and I repeatedly expressed to the reporter, Tony Dokoupil, and the producers that I preferred to keep the conversation centered on the book. After this occurred several times, Jordon, with whom I share both a personal and professional relationship, stepped in to reiterate that point to help refocus the discussion. She was not deflecting any specific question or topic but simply doing her job to ensure the interview stayed on track.

CBS denies this. They released a statement after Belichick’s statement was released (I’m exhausted trying to keep up with this story????). Its a statement-off.

A few things:

1. The press release from Belichick seems somewhat professional and came through UNC, so it seems like perhaps a real PR professional got involved.

2. “Do your job” was the Patriots’ catchphrase for years under Belichick — ie: keep your head down and don’t cause any distractions from the football — so I find it rich that he used that language to apply to Hudson, the biggest distraction of all time.

3. As a PR person who is also romantically involved with the subject, you cannot interject as much as Hudson apparently did and expect the interviewer not to ask about you and the relationship in general. Especially because CBS denies that the interview had any established parameters.

4. As I said on our emergency episode of SGS, Hudson doesn’t seem to want to be Belichick’s PR person. She appears to want to be the story. And it’s working. Why else would she launch his social channels, when he previously didn’t have them? He didn’t need them — he was already extremely famous. But she stood to gain followers by using his account as a way to collaborate with hers and amplify her content. She is competing to be Miss Maine in a week and a half — with the ostensible goal of winning and going on to compete for Miss USA. You probably don’t enter a pageant if you aren’t trying to be front and center.

5. If you do believe that Hudson does want to be Belichick’s PR person, however, you could argue that Jordon simply was trying to keep the interview on track and “do her job,” as Belichick said. But her behavior was apparently unprofessional enough that she has, therefore, become the story. Which means she was a very bad PR person.

6. In my experience, when someone wants to be in front of the camera but has a job that requires them to be behind it, they usually fail at the job they’re supposed to be doing.

7. Do you know how derailed something has to be for CBS News Sunday Morning, the chillest news show of all time, to reveal what went on behind the scenes?

8. Hudson’s behavior since the interview has continued to be unprofessional. She retweeted someone who said this — “Bill looks like he wants to reach across and strangle the life out of the interviewer. I kinda wish he did.” Very 2025 to amplify someone saying that Belichick should have killed a member of the media.

9. I think this interview popped off because Belichick and Hudson have rarely been featured on a platform they don’t control since they started dating. CBS owed them nothing, Hudson behaved badly, and they paid the price for it.

   

   Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

This whole situation is one of the biggest PR disasters I’ve ever witnessed. It’s been very strange to follow a story that began as, “haha, Jordon got Bill on Instagram” to “is this person secretly running the UNC football program?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about why these recent developments seem so disturbing to me. It seems like Hudson has created a distorted reality around Belichick, one where she has convinced him she is saving him from the media while she feeds him to it. So, yes, it’s uncomfortable to watch, very publicly and in real time, someone maybe get taken advantage of. Reports recently came out that Hudson went on a real estate spending spree after she started dating Belichick in 2023.

At the same time, that person is Belichick, a notorious curmudgeon who is very rich and doesn’t really need much sympathy. If this were a retired coach who somehow got himself involved with a person who seems to be at best behaving strangely and at worst taking advantage of him, it would be an interesting and kind of sad story about his personal life.

But he isn’t retired. He is the head coach of a massive football program. He has a lot of power, and now Hudson has a lot of power: she’s very involved at UNC, despite not being hired by the university — she’s like the Elon Musk of college football.

A lot of people are relying on Belichick. People at UNC have jobs because of him (including his son), and student athletes and their parents are trusting him to guide their college careers. A lot of these kids hope to play in the NFL. If I were an athlete, or a parent of one, I would be concerned that the man who is supposed to be in charge of my or my child’s future can’t even control his own public image.

Regardless of whatever is going on behind the scenes — regardless of whether you think this is elder abuse, or are on team “go Jordon, take all his money” — the fact remains that Hudson is also causing athletes to lose opportunities, like being featured on a major show like Hard Knocks. In the age of NIL, when your name, image, and likeness are what gets you paid as a college player, the visibility Hard Knocks could have provided is extremely valuable.

Belichick is not in control of his narrative right now, which means he’s not in charge of the narrative of the program he runs. This is all concerning, given that this is a guy who had, for fifty years prior, one of the most well understood personas in all of sports. And, as we saw in the recent NFL draft with the fall of Sheduer Sanders, the only thing that matters is the story. If you don’t have a firm grasp on that, you aren’t in charge of your own reality.

Someone’s gotta get a grip!