We need to talk about how we're talking about Jordon Hudson
Bill Belichick's much younger girlfriend is being cast as a villain in much the same way we've done to other women influenced by powerful men.
This week's programming guide
Inside ACCess is back in the home studio (i.e. mine and Andrea's actual homes) tonight at 6 p.m. on ACCN where we'll be joined by Pitt running back Desmond Reid. Should be a fun show, please consider joining us.
No, this is not my Buc-ee's recap newsletter. Apologies. After departing lovely Daytona Beach, Florida, I flew directly (well, OK, I had a layover) to Bristol to record some more TV at the Mothership. I was part of five of our ACC preview shows -- Florida State, Miami, Cal, Boston College and Duke -- alongside Wes Durham, Tom Luginbill and EJ Manuel. Andrea was on four others. They're all airing this week on ACCN. Here's a quick clip from the Cal episode.
Having said that, I do plan to get the Buc-ee's recap out at some point this week. So, if you're not yet subscribed, consider clicking the little button below. And if you are subscribed and have enjoyed any of the content thus far, consider sharing the newsletter or asking a friend to sign up. In a perfect world, I'd love to see this become a small community of folks who like to discuss fun topics, learn something new on occasion, and have a good laugh (possibly at my expense). In other words, something a little bit like Twitter used to be before the world decided to be outraged constantly.
On to this week's main topic...
Are the Jordon Hudson stories journalism or navel gazing?
The biggest story in college football right now is about a 24-year-old woman who happens to be dating the head football coach at a school that, aside from the occasional first-round draft pick at QB, rarely matters in the college football world.
You can find breathless coverage of Bill Belichick's girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, on "CBS Sunday Morning" or "The New York Times" or Saturday Night Live or the local paper, along with about a thousand other media outlets of both the "traditional" sort and the TMZ/Barstool variety.
Nearly every headline could, to a degree, be rewritten like this: "24-year-old gold-digger threatens career and reputation of Hall-of-Fame coach."
But here's a question worth asking: Beyond those attention grabbing headlines, what exactly is the story here?
Take, for example, this piece in The New York Times under the headline "Bill Belichick, girlfriend ended UNC’s ‘Hard Knocks’ dalliance as fast as it began. Why?"
Well, in the opening paragraphs, the story suggests Hudson simply pulled the plug for... reasons.
Jordon Hudson, Belichick’s girlfriend, played an instrumental role in stopping the production, related to her request to be heavily involved in the project, according to multiple industry sources briefed on the negotiations.
OK. This certainly fits with previous reporting about Hudson's direct involvement in things related to her boyfriend, who just so happens to be nearly 50 years her senior and also a six-time Super Bowl champion head coach.1
But keep reading that NYT story and you get to something less salacious.
More than 200 pages of emails obtained by The Athletic through a public records request detail how the project was pitched and how close it came to completion. Hudson is not mentioned or included in the emails.
So, what do we really know? The project came to a screeching halt, and some unnamed folks blamed Hudson. Perhaps that's true. For what it's worth, the backstory I'd heard -- long before the Times story came out -- was that it came down to money.
Regardless, the implication is the girlfriend of the head coach was involved in a business deal and screwed it all up because she’s an unqualified hack who is only involved because she’s involved with the boss.
It’s an easy story to write because all of the good details are simply assumed by the reader, who is predisposed (due to years and years and years of narratives about money-grubbing, power-hungry women who slept their way to the top2) rather than directly attributed.
But you know who else had a significant other who was heavily involved in his off-field image building, his professional decision making and his day-to-day life? That'd be UNC's last coach, Mack Brown, whose lovely wife Sally was at his side for almost every major moment in his career. At nearly every major decision point in Brown's career, he'd refer to the choices made by "Sally and I" because he trusted her, relied on her, and appreciated her involvement.
The difference, of course, is Sally is age appropriate for the 74-year-old Brown. Hudson is a tick younger than her current beau.
Indeed, take nearly any of the breathless headlines and joyful retellings of supposed scandals, and the only real there there is Hudson's age. Because she's 24 and not 54 or 64 or 74, there's an implication that all her motivations are self-serving and nefarious (and they might be, though I’d argue that’s true for the 73-year-old man involved, too).
Could it be that she actually knows a thing or two about marketing or social media? Honestly, it's hard to say -- though I'd argue she's probably better at it than Belichick.
Could it be that he's asked her to take on a bigger role because he wants to avoid those distractions and he trusts her to handle it? We don't know that either.
Could it be that the real story here is a wildly successful and rich septuagenarian is dangling lucrative business opportunities in front of a woman just a couple years removed from college in exchange for... well, you know.
It's amazing to me that, in all of this reporting, the problem at the center always seems to be Hudson and not Belichick (or, for that matter, society's general distaste for relationships like this which, though perhaps icky on a personal level, not illegal or entirely uncommon.)3
Indeed, the reporting here feels entirely similar to how the media covered other women entangled in high profile stories in overwhelmingly masculine worlds. See: Lewinsky, Monica. See: Clark, Marcia. See: Hill, Anita. On and on and on.
In each case, the woman took the blame for being a slut or looking for attention or being bad at her job or [insert unverified claim of incompetence or bad intent here].
I remember watching the fantastic O.J. documentary by ESPN a few years back and being astonished at how horribly the media covered Clark throughout the trial (and afterward) for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with her legal acumen but rather her haircut or her attire or her supposed affair with her co-counsel and thinking, "We'd never do that today."
And yet... here we are.
It's entirely possible there is a real story here. It's entirely possible Hudson is a gold-digging such-and-such who will bring down the Belichick empire. It’s possible she’s a complete buffoon when it comes to PR or marketing and is making the jobs of actual professionals incredibly difficult. None of this would come as a surprise.
But I've yet to read any reporting that makes these concerns explicit or suggests that Belichick, himself, isn't entirely responsible for creating the PR spectacle at UNC right now. Indeed, a lot of power brokers at North Carolina might've seen this coming. They were wary of hiring Belichick for myriad reasons, and he wasn't exactly hiding his relationship at the time.
I don’t want this to sound like a woke screed against the misogynistic mainstream media. Instead, I'm arguing the desire to chase headlines in the new attention economy is leading media -- both legacy and new media -- down some old rabbit holes that were problematic 30 years ago and are only more so now that we should know better. It’s crazy to me that we've assigned virtually no agency to the grown man who is in charge of the entire program -- just as we seemed to find it more fun to point the finger at the women instead of Bill Clinton or OJ or Clarence Thomas back in the 1990s.
In fact, look at the way Belichick has handled the rest of the program. His GM, Michael Lombardi, is one of his close friends, a guy he worked with in New England who had been working in media for the past decade before taking this job (and who hadn’t worked in college football since before David Lee Roth left Van Halen). His on-field staff includes two of his own kids, one of his GM's kids, and Bob Diaco, a guy who a) created the Civil ConFLiCT trophy and b) had been fired from his last two Power Four coordinator jobs after just one year (but who happens to have the same agent as Belichick).
Add in that no players or assistant coaches have done any media since Belichick's hire and it's easy to see that he's building an ecosystem where he controls everything within it. So, if the football stuff is being handed over to friends and relatives, why is it such a stretch to think he's entirely responsible for turning over his branding to his girlfriend?
And yet, the villain here is supposedly Hudson in spite of a lack of any evidence of ill intent, any suggestion that Belichick would have wanted it any other way or that, indeed, there is a villain here at all. Best I can tell, the only serious fallout of any of this is that HBO’s cameras aren’t in Chapel Hill right now, and even that may or may not have had anything to do with Hudson’s involvement in the proposed project.
I get that the whole relationship feels scandalous. I get that people want to read about it, gossip about it, speculate about it. All of that is gold in the attention economy. And if you're TMZ, you should... probably be... covering... it a lot.
But for the rest of us who still profess to care about actual journalism, I think we need to tread lightly here and ask what it is we're really hoping to accomplish. What’s the story? What’s the evidence? What is actually happening that represents, you know, news?
Is there a story there? Maybe. But right now, the biggest takeaway seems to be one that needed no reporting at all: A 73-year-old man is dating a 24-year-old woman, and she's getting more from the relationship than a senior discount at the movies.
If you missed last week's Inside ACCess, we were at the Daytona Beach Buc-ee's and did some fun beef jerky taste tests.
There’s also a feature in the works on my 24 hours there, which will debut on Inside ACCess on May 14, our final show of the academic year, which will be coming to you from the ACC spring meetings at Amelia Island.
We also talked to Virginia QB Chandler Morris and had a terrific discussion on the transfer portal with ESPN's Dan Murphy. I noted in last week's newsletter than the agency he wrote about in this terrific feature had a lot of "Wolf of Wall Street" vibes, and sure enough, Dan confirmed there were "numerous" references to that movie made by the agents during his time with them. Gross.
In other news
The Houston Chronicle wrote about my adventure at Buc-ee's and clearly did a lot of research ("a native of Delaware" is a good find) but never actually reached out to me!
I did, however, have a fun chat with the great folks at the Sickos Committee for their podcast. Give it a listen.
I'm going to join the guys at Saturday Down South on their podcast this week, too, so keep an eye out for that.
I talked to Ian Schieffelin, Clemson's star power forward, about his decision to make the switch over to football this season.
I noted on social media that the ACC -- or at least its current schools -- have a nice history of basketball/football crossovers, from Charlie Ward to Greg Paulus to Julius Peppers to Tony Gonzalez to Jimmy Graham. But I also got a good note from the great Bill Dyer, former SID at Virginia Tech, who reminded me that Jeff King and Bryan Randall played both sports for the Hokies, along with Devin Wilson who, Dyer noted, played football for the Hokies in the Belk Bowl in 2017 then the next day joined the basketball team for a game vs. Duke.
And a little more UNC scandal: The News & Observer has this piece about a Tar Heels hoops player suspended amid sexual assault allegations who was still given access to the team facilities.
Lastly, my friend Michael Graff is one of the most talented journalists out there, and this week, he’s launching a really interesting new take on local journalism. If you’re a Charlotte (or Charlotte-adjacent) resident, consider giving it a look.
It should be made clear here that writers do not control the headlines on their stories, nor do they always have much say over what it is they're asked to report, and the folks who put together this particular piece for The Athletic are excellent journalists who did their homework and excavated a lot of public documents. I just don’t think they found much to support the headline on the piece.
My biggest journalism movie/TV show pet peeve is that the female reporter ALWAYS ends up in a sexual relationship with her boss, a source or the subject she’s covering. It’s the laziest type of screenwriting trope.
Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino both have 1-year-old babies now, which is a little less exciting than the diner scene in “Heat” but would make for a funny movie. But my favorite lecherous old man is singer Don McLean, who hasn’t been relevant in nearly 50 years but somehow is still dating a 29-year-old model. I wish it was so simple as to blame the model for Madonna’s horrible disco cover of “American Pie.”
She is an absolute disgrace and embarrassment. Her parents oughta be humiliated and probably are.
Does Bellichick deserve any of the blame? Only 99% of it.