No one can accuse Pete Thamel and Rece Davis of piling on the Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson story.
Davis joined Thamel on their College GameDay Podcast this week after interviewing the UNC head football coach and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney. The two ESPNers tried to separate fact from fiction, taking some not-so-thinly veiled shots at the extensive reporting around the 73-year-old Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson.
We know that Pablo Torre spoke to 11 sources and painted a bleak picture of Hudson’s role in Belichick’s personal and professional life. After an embarrassing CBS Sunday Morning interview, in which the ex-Bridgewater State University cheerleader ran interference and stormed out of a softball interview designed to promote Belichick’s new book, Torre reported that Hudson had been “banned” from UNC’s football facility.
The university quickly denied that, and so did Davis and Thamel, who even defended Hudson’s involvement, at least in the context of Torre’s reporting.
“They did say, Carolina, ‘She’s welcome at the facility,’” Davis said. “I imagine she’s helping him with the social media presence, which a lot of coaches nowadays need. I’m not going to be surprised if she’s around. Would anyone have expected otherwise? I don’t think she’s going to be talking about proper placement for the 3-technique, is she?”
“I think she’s going to resume a role as a coach’s significant other, and that’s completely fine,” said Thamel. “The ‘banned’ from the facility thing made me laugh because it was reported as specifically ‘banned’ from the facility. And I saw it that morning, and I was just like, ‘That’s not true.’ There’s just no – she didn’t rob a bank. Some of what’s been reported, the hyperbole of it, got a lot of the headlines. ‘He won’t come back,’ the ban from the facility, and they just weren’t true.
“The core here is that UNC’s made it clear, Bill Belichick’s made it clear, that any sort of formal role within the program is just not going to exist. And that’s really what’s coming out of this, and that’s not a particularly interesting headline, quite frankly. It doesn’t speak to anything greater other than the roles are there.”
Thamel lamented how UNC didn’t even have a PR person when they attended a practice at Chapel Hill this spring.
“They were in flux in that department,” Thamel adds. “It seems as if, and this is my intimation, she probably tried to fill a need, because they were a couple of bodies short. They filled those bodies now. They have good PR people. They’re moving on.”
Indeed, UNC filled that vacancy, not Belichick and not Hudson. Why a Power Four football program was operating without a PR person is anyone’s guess. But you don’t need 11 sources to know Jordon Hudson shouldn’t have been handling media duties for a blue-blood college football team or her boyfriend coach.
“The notion of celebrity coaches’ wives or significant others, that’s not new,” Davis said. “The whole Notre Dame-USC series, way back in the day, started in large part because of [Knute] Rockne’s wife… These things happen. The Belichick thing, as you mentioned earlier, is going to be magnified and amplified.”
“The one thing that when I made a few calls on this last week that was very clear to me, and explicitly stated and pounded over my head, that any notion that he’s like checked out or not working is just like completely false,” Thamel added. “Like, total goobly goop. That guy’s in the building pre-dawn; he’s the last one there. Bill Belichick is completely and totally obsessed with football in the same way he was when he started as an NFL assistant, like 50 years ago.”
Thamel called the notion that Belichick would walk away “silly.”
“He’s going to coach this season,” Thamel claims. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you he’s going to coach 10 years. You hire a 73-year-old, the clock’s ticking on some type of exit within a few years. But the notion that he would walk away from this now, that’s just crazy.”
It’s worth noting that Torre didn’t report that Belichick might leave. He only responded to a question saying there was an “absolutely real chance ” he won’t coach a game because of the PR mess involving Hudson and the fact that his buyout decreases by $9 million come June 1.
Despite being incredibly well-sourced, Torre’s reporting got a pretty cold shoulder from his former ESPN colleagues. How much of that is because they genuinely don’t believe the reporting, how much is because of their preexisting relationship with Belichick (who appeared on College GameDay several times), and how much is because of the ESPN/ACC relationship is up to the beholder.
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