North Carolina football is now the flagship program of the Jordon Brand
Let’s check in and see how things are going with the flagship school of the Jordon Brand.
Those UNC trustees who insisted on dumping a giant pile of money on Bill Belichick because they wanted a big-time program have certainly managed to wedge North Carolina football into the national spotlight, there’s no question about that.
They wanted a 73-year-old NFL legend as the face of their football team and ended up with a 24-year-old social-media influencer instead. When Belichick was hired, his relationship with Jordon Hudson was a novelty, an asterisk, tabloid fodder. Now, it has managed to overshadow the entire program.
It’s going to take a lot of wins to make up for an offseason that’s made North Carolina football a punch line in less than six months.
Belichick is, of course, free to do whatever he wants in his personal life and on Instagram. The significant others and families of college coaches are rarely public figures, nor should they be, without a compelling reason otherwise. Belichick and Hudson can attend as many galas and spend as much time in photo shoots as they like, as long as it doesn’t affect his performance or besmirch the university.
Wherever that line is, Belichick and Hudson have now crossed it. Willingly. Even Belichick now describes their relationship as “personal and professional.”
There’s a big difference between Mack Brown referring to career decisions being made by “Sally and me,” or Dawn Bunting trying to purge the bad juju at Kenan Stadium, and Hudson stepping in to interrupt an interview with CBS, being copied on internal UNC correspondence at Belichick’s insistence, publicly feuding with the publishers of his book and being the source of countless man-hours of extra effort from university administrators and lawyers.
Would anyone be surprised at an Instagram post from Hudson at this point announcing how happy and excited she is that “Bill has decided to switch to a base nickel defense” or something?
The interview with CBS Sunday Morning was the tipping point, when the network actually included a clip of Hudson interrupting the interview to shut down a question about how she and Belichick met, something they had previously publicly discussed. Their meet-cute in first class is supposed to be canon. It was the kind of question you ask because you think an interviewee wants to answer it.
That kind of wrangling does occasionally happen in those settings, but it almost never makes the air outside of an episode of “Veep.” It’s part of making the sausage. So imagine how frustrated the CBS producers must have been with Belichick and Hudson to actually include that clip.
And this wasn’t even 60 Minutes brandishing a sheaf of incriminating documents! It was a softball interview with a weekend morning show to promote a book! Literally the least adversarial setting in big-time television journalism! A professional publicist would understand that, and be wary of the Streisand Effect. Or even aware of its existence.
If the powers that be at UNC were initially disappointed that Belichick and Hudson were wearing Navy gear instead of promoting the place where he now works and is theoretically trying to attract transfers and recruits to play, they must now be eternally grateful not to see their logo over and over again in the clips and screen grabs that went viral for all the wrong reasons.
It would, however, have given them something to talk about with their counterparts at Duke after the folks in Durham objected to the infamous T-shirt in “The White Lotus,” speaking of the Streisand Effect.
Belichick’s subsequent protest — released via a university, not athletic department, spokesman — that the interview was only supposed to be about Belichick’s new book showed just how out of their depth the happy couple is; a promotional opportunity like that is naturally going to touch on the new job he chose to take and the relationship they have chosen to put in the spotlight, just like every soft-focus celebrity interview ever. Only the naive and clueless would think otherwise, and Belichick certainly was neither during his NFL career.
“When we agreed to speak with Mr. Belichick, it was for a wide-ranging interview. There were no preconditions or limitations to this conversation,” CBS responded in a statement of its own.
Before that kerfuffle even had a chance to die down, The Athletic reported this week that a Belichick-focused “Hard Knocks” miniseries — once reported to be a done deal by NFL insiders, with a press release drafted and promotional materials prepared — fell apart in March after lengthy negotiations between NFL Films and the university because Belichick withdrew at the last minute, allegedly because NFL Films would not allow Hudson to be involved as a producer.
Even if it was merely something as benign as rushing ahead without considering complicated rights issues — this is where zombie Raycom often pops its head up — for an alleged pro-style program, it’s amateur-hour stuff. Belichick promised to deliver a 33rd NFL team, but apparently that just meant UNC football was going to be more publicly dysfunctional than the New York Jets.
Although even the Jets managed to get a season of “Hard Knocks” on the air.
This was always going to be a beautiful disaster, like a monkey trying to fly a 737, but Belichick’s tenure is already a rank embarrassment, for him and for North Carolina — and he hasn’t even lost a game yet.
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This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "North Carolina football is now the flagship program of the Jordon Brand."
