In a truly Freudian Romeo and Juliet love story, UNC is doing everything in its power to keep Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson apart. According to a report from Pablo Torre on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, Hudson has been banned from the North Carolina football facility amidst a public relations fiasco that began with Hudson interjecting herself into a CBS Sunday Morning interview promoting Belichick’s new book, The Art of Winning.
Among the many revelations about Belichick’s girlfriend throughout the episode, two different sources at North Carolina told Torre that “Jordon Hudson is no longer allowed in the football building. She is not allowed on the football field.” Then Torre dropped arguably the most exciting news for North Carolina football fans, quoting one of his sources, “Don’t think you’ll be hearing much from Jordon moving forward.”
Jordon Hudson banned from North Carolina football facility
Hudson has become a major distraction for the UNC football program, a program that was desperate to make a splash when it hired the eight-time Super Bowl Champion as its head coach. The episode went on to detail how Hudson forced her way into the Dunkin Donuts Super Bowl commercial with Belichick, added depth to the report that Hudson played a major role in submarining a deal with NFL Films for Hard Knocks to come to UNC, and revealed that Belichick’s family “is extraordinarily concerned about what has transpired,” according to Torre’s sources.
North Carolina needed to do something about the Jordon Hudson problem, and to the credit of the athletic department, it has clearly taken steps to silence the bad press around the program and its head coach. The question now, as Torre’s guests Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kayne asutely pointed out, is whether or not Belichick himself was behind this effort to clean up his image and silence Hudson.
Throughout his NFL career, Belichick did a masterful job of controlling distractions around his team, ones much more serious than anything that he and Hudson have created throughout the past month. So, is the 73-year-old first-time college football coach grabbing the reins of his program with Year 1 off to a shaky start, or is Belichick, the ultimate football control freak, being told to fall in from the higher-ups?
Any Tar Heels fan who expects this experiment to create a winning product on the field, better hope that it's the former. Belichick has never allowed his personal life to get in the way of winning, so he could be falling back into those old ways to conjure up his old winning formula in Chapel Hill (or Chapel Bill (Bill’s Version) as Hudson would prefer it to be called).
So far, this has not been the Bill Belichick that North Carolina signed thought it was signing up for, and now with Hudson far away from the program, maybe that version of the greatest head coach in football history will finally show up.
UPDATE: UNC denies report that Jordon Hudson is banned
In the wake of Torre's reporting that Hudson is banned from the facility, UNC has issued a rebuttal. Torre is a trusted source, so it's possible that the decision-makers in Chapel Hill are backtracking to avoid a further PR mess. Either way, the fiasco continues for the Tar Heels.