Belichick’s girlfriend tried to manage the message. Instead, she became it.

A national TV interview, a girlfriend in the spotlight and a book to promote. Bill Belichick’s sit-down with CBS Sunday Morning was supposed to be about his life in football, but awkward moments made headlines.

It’s a they-said-they-said. Bill Belichick and girlfriend Jordon Hudson vs. Tony Dokoupil and the CBS Sunday Morning production crew.  

Belichick’s CBS interview was brokered to promote his new book

In short, Bill Belichick’s CBS interview was booked by a publicist at Simon & Schuster to promote the multi-Super-Bowl-winning coach’s book, The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football. That’s what makes the outcome all the more puzzling.

When you work with a book publicist — any publicist — and they tee up a national appearance to spotlight your own words, you're asking for attention. You have to expect questions about what’s in the book and, if you’re well-known, what’s not. If your personal life is already in the headlines, expect questions about that, too. That’s the price of publicity.

Belichick’s relationship with Jordon Hudson is more public than anything he revealed during his days coaching the New England Patriots

Let’s be real-real — when you and your girlfriend post photos on social media and she makes herself seen and heard during an interview, you can’t be caught off-guard when a reporter asks about it. CBS released a statement saying there were no limitations on the interview. Bill and Jordon say there were.

Bill knows better

Instead of owning the moment or even going monosyllabic like NFL Bill, Belichick acted like Dokoupil’s questions caught him off guard. But you can’t play the media-savvy coach one second and the “why-are-you-asking-me-this” guy the next. And good publicists prepare you for what could be asked and help you frame your answers ahead of time. I don’t know for sure, I have to trust Simon & Schuster’s publicist did this. Even if she didn’t, Hudson and/or Belichick could have answered in a way it didn’t become the story’s headline.

Jordon Hudson’s interruptions shifted the narrative

One argument, particularly the one from Belichick in response to the CBS piece and watercooler aftermath, is that his girlfriend was protecting him and steering the conversation back to the book. If she were experienced, she would have collaborated with the publisher’s publicist, and the person who booked the appearance would have asked the reporter to stick to the book — which, in reality, Dokoupil did, because Bill called Jordon his muse in the book.

An interview that could have been neatly packaged and repurposed into other publicity media for months instead turned into gossip fodder.

It’s the media’s responsibility to ask

Producers and reporters do their homework, so they owe it to their audience to ask about what fans are already discussing. For better or worse, that includes a relationship people in sports are talking about. NFL Bill used to crush those, whether the media liked his answers or not.

The way Hudson handled the interview — interrupting Dokoupil when he asked Belichick simple questions that Bill knows how to handle — made their relationship a bigger part of the story than it needed to be. Bill’s explanation the day following the interview’s air kept it on the front burner.

A cosmetic/branding thing

The University of North Carolina couldn’t have been happy with Bill’s sweatshirt in the CBS piece. Sports fans know he treasures Navy because his dad coached there. But the Tar Heels pay him a lot of money to be the face of their football program. The least he could do is support his current team in a nationally televised interview. (This is something a publicist would also suggest ahead of time.) It’s not the worst thing to come out of the interview, but it's a thing.

Emotions happen

Emotions matter when we work with people we care about. But in professional settings, they’ve got to take a backseat. Be sure your publicist knows—and follows rules of the road. In Bill’s case, the CBS interview turned into punchline fuel instead of a graceful look at his career.

🫡I wasn’t going to touch the story because it felt goopy-gossipy. A text from media friend Kevin and a subsequent radio segment about the PR fallout are what got us here.

Publicists’ roles during interviews

Publicists can and do interject at times when they state ahead of time that a topic is off-limits. Like I told Kevin, however, I won’t even schedule an interview if topics aren’t allowed because it sends too many red flags. Disagreements happen less when everyone involved works as a team before cameras roll. It feels like that collaboration didn’t happen and that led to unBelichickian publicity results.

The 2025 NFL Draft Delivered

Green Bay, Wisconsin, produced as promised. The NFL Draft weekend ran smoothly, and for most attendees I spoke with, it came down to one thing: community. Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of Deion, slipping to Day 3 likely boosted TV ratings, but the real win was on the ground. Friendly support staff at every post knew where to point fans and media where they needed to be. (That’s not always the case in Super Bowl cities.) Events were organized. It felt collaborative — a coordinated effort by the city, surrounding areas, law enforcement and facilities crews. A big hand to the smallest city in the NFL for hosting its biggest event in team history.

© 2025 Gail Sideman, gpublicity

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