When Bill Belichick arrived at the University of North Carolina, the football team didn’t have a sports information director.
That fits with what Pete Thamel and Rece Davis said on their College GameDay Podcast. According to Thamel, the PR department was “in flux” when the two arrived at Chapel Hill for spring practice. And we now know that this proved to have many avoidable consequences, as Belichick suffered the ill effects of not having a PR person.
That’s what Jordon Hudson essentially was. She filled that role during the now-infamous CBS Sunday Morning interview. Belichick had lost his longtime PR titan, Berj Najaria, now Bill O’Brien’s chief of staff at Boston College. He had been talking with Brandon Faber for a few months then, but seemingly figured he could get by with the 24-year-old Hudson, who Thamel mentioned was merely filling a need.
After a few brutal weeks in the headlines, UNC filled that need on its own. The university reportedly hired Faber, the ex-Chicago Bears PR chief, as the head of the program’s football communications. Help is on the way, but not before it got out of hand.
This week, Belichick has been proactive in shaping the narrative, granting interviews to Good Morning America, ESPN, and The Pivot. On Ryan Clark’s podcast, he opened up about the Hard Knocks deal falling through and the PR vacuum he faced upon arriving.
Belichick insists that Hudson’s role was separate from his duties at UNC.
“It would be personal opportunities. It could be a speaking thing, it could be an appearance on this, or talk about this, or somebody wants whatever it happens to be an autograph, or that type of thing,” Belichick told his former Inside the NFL colleague. “And so, she’d kind of help organize that for me. One of the first things that came out when North Carolina sent me emails saying, ‘These people want to talk to you…’ I sent back an email, ‘Can you please copy Jordon on these requests?’ so she could at least filter through them because there was nobody.
“We didn’t have a sports information guy. Because all emails are shared publicly, that was taken as Jordon’s running the sports information department. And that also led to a narrative, which is just totally — she’s not doing it. I mean, there was nobody to help me sort it out, so I was asking her to do it.”
Anyone who’s covered college athletics knows the SID is the primary contact for managing interview requests and coordinating with local media. Some of what Belichick referred to isn’t typically within an SID’s official responsibilities, technically speaking.
It remains unclear why Belichick and North Carolina went so long without filling that crucial role. That said, the consequences made it painfully obvious that they couldn’t ignore it any longer.
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