This can’t be what North Carolina believed it was getting. It just can’t.
How someone, anyone, in that painfully dysfunctional group of misfits making decisions at North Carolina could not have seen this from a country mile is beyond comprehension.
Now what?
Now you have a 24-year-old running your football program, by proxy.
Now you’ve mortgaged your future for Bill Belichick, a coach who may or may not have been the reason the New England Patriots won six Super Bowls. A coach and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who last weekend made it abundantly and awkwardly clear who wears the, um, jersey, in the relationship.
More disconcerting to all things North Carolina: who clearly has Belichick’s ear.
Belichick, 73, calls Hudson his “muse” in a new book – ‘The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football’ – and she has been running communications on his book tour.
This is where the car drives directly into the ditch.
A comms director controls everything, making sure no detail too small is missed. You know, like the author of the book and newly hired coach at North Carolina showing up to an interview on ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ wearing a tattered and torn Navy sweatshirt.
Not a North Carolina sweatshirt. Or a UNC polo or windbreaker or even Belichick’s trademark hoodie. For the love of Dean Smith, something Carolina blue.
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Belichick shows up in his torn sweatshirt and handles the interview about like you’d think he would. Surly and annoyed at times, short answers and no answers in others.
Then came the money shot. The exact moment when all of those deep-pocket boosters at North Carolina – who spent tens of millions of dollars on Belichick and his coaching staff, and committed to tens of millions more in NIL funds – realized they may have made a colossal mistake.
The Belichick persona, the my-way-or-the-highway coaching philosophy getting the most from players, is the foundation of those Super Bowl titles. That’s what you’re getting with Belichick, no questions asked.
Until you don’t — until his 24-year-old girlfriend of two years kneecaps that aura with one uncomfortable interjection.
Belichick was asked in the interview how he and Hudson met, and Hudson spoke up and said, “We’re not talking about that.”
Belichick, with a blank face, didn’t say a word.
The meanest, toughest, gruffest coach in the history of coaches, the man who built an unassailable reputation as the hardest edge in the history of hard edges, was summarily emasculated on national television by his muse of 50 years the younger.
What in the wide, wide world of sports did we just watch?
Did Hudson really think CBS wanted Belichick on to talk about his book and X’s and O’s, and how he built a dynasty with the Patriots behind the greatest player to ever play the game? Did Hudson think CBS wouldn’t reach for the low-hanging fruit and ask how a then 22- and 71-year-old met? This is Beli’s muse?
His m-m-m-muse.
For a coach who seemingly has an answer for everything on the field, how could he have not been prepared for this blindside hit? Or maybe he was, and didn’t care.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s not that Belichick deferred to his girlfriend and refused to answer the question, it’s that he was so unprepared for the interview. Prior to Hudson putting her foot down on how they met – which, shockingly, is raging on social media – Belichick was asked why Patriots owner Bob Kraft was not even mentioned in the book.
When Belichick stumbled with any semblance of an answer, he was told that Kraft said he fired Belichick — despite Belichick contending to this day it was a mutual agreement. Twice, Belichick was told Kraft said he fired him, and twice Belichick doubled-down on mutual agreement. Maybe the muse should’ve stepped in there, too.
Here’s the overriding problem: young people, specifically young people playing college football, are married to social media. It’s their lifeblood.
The entire North Carolina locker room has seen the interview, and has seen the muse — who hangs out at practice, once in a sequined robe — kneecap their head coach. Their big, bad, Super Bowl-winning head coach.
If Hudson can do it in that moment, where else can she draw a line? And where else will Belichick defer to her?
There’s a reason no NFL team, despite Belichick’s remarkable record, wanted any part of him over the last two hiring cycles. Who knows whether it’s a reach to connect the dots.
But it’s easy to see the car in the ditch from here.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.