The Bill Belichick UNC documentary has had more lives than a cat. It started with HBO’s Hard Knocks, fell through with Hulu, and now Pablo Torre is reporting that the production company EverWonder is still rolling cameras and “supposedly” planning to release a film after the season ends.
“There have been so many embarrassing leaks that it would, in fact, make for an excellent docuseries about this program,” Torre said on his Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.
“That Hulu thing is not going to come out,” he continued. “The program didn’t want to do, I am told, an episodic, you know, docuseries approach. So, Hulu pulled out of it. EverWonder, which is the big production company that has been making it, is still shooting it, I am told. They’re just pivoting to being a film to come out after the season, supposedly. So there’s just that looming in all of it.”
Back in late February, news broke that North Carolina could become the first college football program featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks. By March 4, the NFL and HBO pulled the plug. The Athletic reported that an email from the NFL’s VP of business affairs stated that “the conversation took a turn that we were not comfortable with.”
Days later, UNC general manager Michael Lombardi appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and stated that the football program was actually the one that scrapped the project. Lombardi contended they did not want the story to end after training camp. They wanted to document all of Belichick’s work in his first season as a college coach.
“Hard Knocks is training camp. And we’re not training camp,” Belichick clarified. “That’s not what we are, the drama of training camp, and who’s going to get cut and all that. We’re a season, and they don’t want that. There’s film issues, too. But forget about the film issues. Just say you could straighten all those out. The Hard Knocks just didn’t fit for us. That’s the bottom line.”
The bottom line was also that, according to The Athletic, Jordon Hudson — Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend and de facto agent who operates as chief operating officer of his production company — played an “instrumental” role in stopping the project. Hudson had reportedly demanded content approval and partial ownership of the Hard Knocks series, and these demands contributed to the problem.
They took those demands to Hulu. However, when Hulu was unwilling to meet the needs of college football’s most celebrated power couple, it became just another notch in the idea that sports documentaries are often worthless. UNC’s disastrous start to the season changed the entire equation. Belichick was apparently contemplating an exit strategy, and the footage no longer resembled the awe-inspiring story that Hudson and Belichick wanted to tell.
They’ve maintained that they didn’t want their relationship at the center of the narrative, and there’s probably some truth to that, given how protective Hudson has been about the story of how they met. However, if EverWonder is still rolling cameras, then something is definitely still to come.
If it ever comes out after the season, it will be the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Belichick’s first year at North Carolina. The question now is whether UNC, Belichick, and Hudson will even allow it to see the light of day.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.