NFL's answer to Fergie is dating a 24-year-old... and America is obsessed

Telegraph

2 days ago

Bill Belichick is the most successful American football coach in history, an all-conquering dynasty-builder with all of the usual personality traits that entails.
You do not win six Super Bowls without immense focus and there are countless tales of his obsessive dedication. Work calls on Christmas Day, reducing co-coaches to exhausted husks with his frightening appetite for grafting.
He was monosyllabic and taciturn to the point of self-parody in press conferences for the New England Patriots, often making Sir Alex Ferguson look like Ian Holloway. One year The Wall Street Journal tracked the number of times Belichick smiled in a season of media appearances. They counted seven.
There was never much glimpse of hinterland, Belichick seemed uninterested in anything beyond football. He left the Patriots in 2023 and loosened up slightly when working as a pundit the following season.
In December last year he took a job as head coach of the University of North Carolina (UNC). Along the way there have been some unusual Instagram posts.
Here is previously inscrutable Belichick doing yoga, lifting up an acrobatic woman on the beach with his legs.
He has been shown petting goats and eating some strawberries arranged to look like a lobster.
Most unexpected was the photo of Belichick dressed as a fisherman, casting his rod over a woman in the waves who is wearing a mermaid costume.
The woman posting these pictures, who is alongside him in most and presumed responsible for this drastic tonal shift, is girlfriend Jordon Hudson. Their relationship has become a source of fascination in the United States.
Hudson is a former competitive cheerleader, thanked in Belichick's new book The Art of Winning as his 'idea mill and creative muse'. Belichick is 73 and Hudson is 24, which is somewhere between irrelevant and inappropriate depending on your point of view.
She is increasingly by Belichick's side in his working life, although this goes both ways. Belichick was in the crowd at a Holiday Inn in Portland, Maine, earlier this month when Hudson was a contestant in a beauty pageant.
Belichick says Hudson is working for him in an advisory role, giving her view on business, media and the non-football aspects of his life. On LinkedIn she lists among her previous roles chief operating officer for Belichick Productions. There has been some friction about the control she is perceived to exert and insinuations it is outsized.
NFL Films planned to create a documentary about Belichick at UNC. Hudson reportedly demanded approval and the project has been shelved.
She has applied for trademarks of phrases associated with Belichick, some which are owned by the Patriots. To circumnavigate this the applications were appended with (Bill's Version), like Taylor Swift's re-recorded albums. There were reports that Hudson was barred from 'the football building' at UNC. The university has denied those reports.
There was a frosty appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, which is hardly Paxman, more like Sunday Brunch, when Belichick was asked how he met Hudson. Hudson, shown behind the interview zone watching on a monitor interjected. 'We're not talking about this.'
NEW: Bill Belichick's 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson interjects & shuts down a question during the middle of an interview on CBS.
This is wild.
Hudson reportedly interrupted multiple times.
Interviewer to Belichick: "How did you guys meet?"
Hudson from across the room:… pic.twitter.com/qsVNRBLPGE
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 27, 2025
'Jordon was a constant presence in our interview,' said a sceptical voice-over from interviewer Tony Dokoupil. The public line is they met on a flight in 2021. Hudson has shared a picture of a book Belichick signed for her then, dated and helpfully including a list of his Super Bowl wins.
Some more interventionist whispers followed Belichick's appearance on The Pivot podcast last week, co-hosted by former NFL pros Ryan Clark and Channing Crowder.
'His old lady is different,' Crowder said after the interview. 'She lurks. It's weird to know him as Coach Belichick running the entire organisation as GM [general manager], head coach, talent coordinator, all that stuff, and then to see this tiny little 95-pound girl pretty much telling him what to do… he just smiles and nods.'
Crowder later apologised, saying: 'I apologise to Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson for my comments. It was wrong to speculate on their personal matters without any basis.' Clark said: 'The narrative that people want to build around her and her control wasn't displayed during our interview,' but admitted: 'Jordon wanted to be represented in a certain way, wanted their relationship to be represented in a certain way.'
Dave Portnoy, another in the near-infinite pool of prominent American bro media figures, said: 'I had met Jordon and it was clear that she ran the show. She's the boss woman of this mythical Bill Belichick Enterprises. She's not hiding. Something bad happens, she takes a selfie and she's right back firing emails. She's not taking a step back.'
Despite some mildly hysterical theories about Hudson, her actions sound no more sinister than the usual PR manoeuvring, a keenness to control the message tightly.
This goes on for all celebrities and perhaps here it is just taking place in a slightly clumsy way. You are not supposed to hear about these machinations second-hand, let alone allow footage of yourself intervening in a TV interview, be recorded, then aired.
Yet it is hard to deny the oddness of the situation. This man steered the most successful NFL team of the modern era, straddling the roles of coach and general manager in unprecedented fashion. Now he is seemingly taking cues from a twentysomething with an eye for an Instagram post.
In a particularly gruff press conference after a rare humbling to Kansas City Chiefs in 2014, Belichick repeated the answer 'we're on to Cincinnati' [their next game] so frequently it had the trajectory of a Stewart Lee joke. Funny, less funny, boring, then funny again.
When his promotional duties for his book are concluded, you sense this is the approach Belichick will fall back upon. UNC's season starts in September and Belichick will surely stand alone again by then, in the fashion gridiron fans have come to understand him.
Or maybe he really is winding down, branching out and (partially) lightening up. Bill Parcells, another era-defining NFL coach, retired from head coaching at 65. Eleven years later he foresaw the future for Belichick. 'He's gonna make that transition some day and realise that there is another life out there.' Who could predict that so much of it would take place on social media?