ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Rece Davis didn’t buy a report by Pablo Torre, a former employee at the network, that claimed Bill Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson was banned from the UNC facility.
During Wednesday’s installment of their “College GameDay” podcast, Thamel and Davis laughed over the drama surrounding the UNC football coach and Hudson, who’s reportedly trying to control his career, both on and off of the football field.
“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 hand placement for the 3-technique, is she?”
Thamel, who did not name Torre, brought up his report and explained that he didn’t believe it from the beginning.
“I think she’s going to resume a role as a coach’s significant other, and that’s completely fine,” Thamel said. “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 has made it clear, Bill Belichick has 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 added that UNC didn’t have a PR representative when he attended a practice at Chapel Hill this spring.
“They were in flux in that department,” Thamel said. “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.”
Davis went on to explain that Hudson, a former cheerleader at Bridgewater State University, isn’t the first famous WAG to nab headlines.
“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 also said he believes Belichick, 73, will coach this season at UNC, seemingly referencing Torre’s report that there is a real chance the six-time Super Bowl winner won’t coach.
“He’s going to coach this season,” Thamel said. “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.”
In his investigation, Torre said he spoke with 11 sources who have dealt directly with Hudson and alleged she is trying to control Belichick’s career in order to further her own.
Belichick and UNC denied that in a joint statement.
The couple, who went public with their relationship last summer, has been at the center of scrutiny since Belichick’s disastrous “CBS Sunday Mornings” interview, which aired April 27 and showed Hudson stopping Belichick from answering a question about how they met.
During an interview with “Good Morning America” on Friday, Belichick told Michael Strahan that Hudson has been “terrific” and explained her role in his professional life, which doesn’t involve UNC football.
“She’s been terrific through the whole process, and she’s been really helpful to me,” Belichick said when asked about the attention their relationship has received. “She does the business things that don’t relate to North Carolina that come up in my life, so I can concentrate football and that’s really what I want to do.”
“Are you happy?” Strahan asked.
“Yeah,” Belichick said with a smile.
It followed Belichick’s Tuesday appearance on “SportsCenter,” during which he said Hudson has nothing to do with his football program.
Belichick told ESPN he discussed the situation surrounding his personal life with his team and that it won’t be a distraction.
UNC has backed Belichick amidst the media firestorm and praised him as a professional.