Bill Belichick appears on CBS Sunday Morning in April 2025. Bill Belichick appears on CBS Sunday Morning in April 2025. (CBS.)

There continue to be interesting tidbits unearthed by those digging into the Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson relationship. The personal relationship between the 73-year-old University of North Carolina coach and the 24-year-old former cheerleader is one thing, but the ways Hudson is or isn’t involved with the Tar Heels’ football program are quite another, especially with that program representing a public university. And UNC’s public status makes it a viable target for media public records requests through the Freedom of Information Act, and those have now produced some fascinating details on the responses from Belichick and the university to the infamous CBS Sunday Morning interview with the coach.

First, it’s worth a look back at the timing here. That interview aired on April 27, and the university released a statement attributed to Belichick on April 30. But there were already some FOIA requests and obtained emails under discussion around Belichick and Hudson before that.

In March, Matt Hartman of North Carolina statewide digital magazine The Assembly obtained (as part of a larger piece on Belichick) one of the coach’s emails. That email asked university senior associate athletic director Robbi Pickeral Evans to copy Hudson “on anything you send me.” That drew massive attention (and later saw a Belichick defense that he only meant emails about media opportunities for him, and that he only did this because of the school lacking a specific sports information director for football on his arrival), and led to further records requests, including The Athletic’s Matt Baker obtaining some of the emails sent to Belichick and Hudson in early April, and writing a piece on Hudson’s role at UNC with that information.

The records requests and information gleaned from them have continued to grow since then, particularly exploding after that CBS interview. They haven’t all been responded to quickly, though. Pablo Torre, who has produced much of the most notable reporting on Belichick and Hudson, noted on May 27 that UNC had not responded to many of his FOIA requests that had a May 30 deadline, and said he was open to suing the school if they didn’t meet the deadline. (Torre hasn’t done that yet, but did mention on his latest show this week that he’s still waiting on records requests.)

But, on Friday (in a potential Friday afternoon news dump), UNC did release a trove of data to at least some who had requested it. And a writeup from Brian Murphy and Ashley Forster at WRAL (the Raleigh NBC affiliate) of the records they received illustrates some particularly interesting things about the responses from Belichick and UNC overall to that CBS interview.

To start with, it’s significant that the first email from Belichick to university figures (at least, the first one released in this set) about the CBS interview came on April 29, two days after the interview aired. That was the same day that Hudson posted “full statement coming soon” to her Instagram page.

There, Belichick outlined a potential statement to Beth Keith, a senior associate vice chancellor in the Office of University Communications, and they went back and forth on versions of that statement until the next day, when it was eventually released in the afternoon. An early-morning text message from Belichick to Keith that day included “I’m still working thru the situation with the publisher/Inkwell. I apologize for the delays here – I don’t want to make a wrong move.”

The discussions over the statement and just what it would include are certainly interesting, as is the timing of these conversations (with the delay in response seemingly more about Belichick and his publisher than the university). And there are some new details in those emails and texts that weren’t in the actual statement. For example, Belichick mentions that CBS reporter Tony Doukopil talked to him for 35 uninterrupted minutes about the book (which is all he wanted to discuss; he said he and his publicist insisted all other topics were “off limits” before the interview, something previously reported, but CBS maintains there were no conditions agreed to) before pivoting to other questions.

Belichick also says Hudson was present because his book publicist, Simon & Schuster’s David Kass, couldn’t make the interview, and that she asked to sit “off-camera,” but “CBS secretly had a camera focused on her.” And he says the “35:59” timestamp Hudson posted to Instagram wasn’t about her delaying the interview, as CBS said in their statement, but about CBS trying to convince him to do a walk-and-talk that he didn’t want to do.

Those details didn’t make the actual statement here, which is perhaps understandable given the focus UNC wanted to get across. But they are quite notable claims against CBS and their process here (and that outlet has been under fire on a different TV news front lately, with President Donald Trump suing them over “deceptive editing” of a Kamala Harris interview, and with the company reportedly looking to settle (although maybe not now) despite criticism from their news employees and other journalists). It’s interesting to see those allegations come out through these FOIA releases rather than individual comments or releases from Belichick or Hudson, and we’ll see if CBS has any response to them.

However, maybe the most notable thing in these documents doesn’t involve Belichick directly. That’s the section about university officials’ proposed form response to people complaining to the chancellor about the light Belichick and Hudson were casting on the school in the wake of the CBS interview. Here’s some of that:

Later on April 30, Keith wrote to Brigitta Shoupe, an associate director of issues management and media relations at UNC, for help in drafting “an email template to respond” to emails from disgruntled fans or alums. The request came after Christi Hurt, the chief of staff to UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts, forwarded one such email to Keith. Hurt wrote that “I’m getting quite a few of these … not form emails.”

The email Hurt shared was from a 1977 alumna who wrote that she had “never felt compelled to write a letter to our leadership, until now. I’m writing in response to the actions taken by Bill Belichick and his 24 year old girlfriend.”

The email continued: “Never did I think UNC would become a laughing stock in the sports world because of his young girlfriend.”

Shouple responded to Keith hours later with a proposed formatted response that was four paragraphs long. It misspelled “Belichik” throughout.

“Thank you for reaching out, for sharing your views, and for your continued engagement and interest in Carolina,” it said. “Coach Belichik [sic] brings a wealth of experience in coaching and football at the highest levels. The news media has demonstrated an ongoing interest in those previous experiences and activities outside of Kenan Stadium.”

Kevin Best, a senior director of media relations, offered changes. He wrote that, based on the email from the alumna, “this is more than just the CBS interview. We need to reference Jordan’s role, perhaps referencing the person and professional relationship.”

It’s unclear if UNC officials figured out how to spell Belichick’s name before sending these responses to aggrieved alums. But whether they did or didn’t, it’s remarkable to see these numbers of high-level staff discussing how to respond to complaining alumni. (The Athletic’s Brendan Marks previously received and published some of the complaining emails.)

And that perhaps helps illuminate the internal UNC discussions and debates around Belichick and Hudson that have been such a focus of Torre’s reporting (some of which the university, its employees, and Hudson contest, but he’s standing by it). This information reveals a lot about how the school has responded to the negative attention it’s received over Belichick and Hudson, and it presents notable things to keep in mind around potential PR actions from them going forward.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.