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The Belichick experiment is failing off the field.
The Tar Heels looked better Friday night in Berkeley where they were a fumble away from taking the lead and maybe beating an average Cal team. If Carolina keeps improving, there is a chance for several victories over the last half of the season.
What is not getting better is the ill-fated relationship between the so-called greatest coach of all time and the proud University of North Carolina. The Heels traveled across the country to play their first ACC road game. But they were greeted by the Cal student body with insulting chants and the school’s official videoboard piling on with memes.
UNC wanted Belichick’s hire to become a national story, and that it has. His first college team isn’t doing nearly as well as expected, and while his girlfriend Jordon Hudson travels with him to road games she remains part of the story that embarrasses Carolina.
This is definitely not what my alma mater and thousands of alums counted on, and it continues to be a distraction wherever they are seen together. If it was as bad as reported at Cal, imagine what will happen when the Tar Heels travel to Syracuse, Wake Forest and, especially, N.C. State over the next six weeks.
Rival schools can discourage such tasteless treatment, but that won’t keep the crowds from pouring it on. What the 73-year-old Belichick’s slow start on the field and his very visible 24-year-old girlfriend have done for UNC’s reputation is getting worse, not better. Hudson may not be a burden for the team itself, but she is elsewhere.
SFGate reported, “Things went from bad to worse for Belichick and Hudson when they spent Friday night watching the North Carolina team lose on national television while getting relentlessly trolled.” This is not what Trustees John Preyer and Jennifer Lloyd envisioned when they pushed for the Hoodie’s hire.
SFGate called it a scandal, which is the last thing UNC needs after seven years of the academic athletic disgrace that subsided in 2017 but still simmers in some circles where Carolina often is debated. “UNCheat” is the tag State uses regularly.
The videoboard mocked the official one-sentence statements of support issued by Belichick and Bubba Cunningham “despite it being well-known” that the Carolina athletic director did not want to hire him. True or not, it is still part of the narrative.
It was made worse by the report that “late in the first half Hudson came down through the stands to make her way into the North Carolina tunnel, presumably for halftime,” where a security guard checked her credential before letting her in.
What was she going to do, give her man a pep talk midway through a close 14-10 game? As much as UNC has tried to quell that part of the story, it has been about as successful as the football team.
Featured image via Associated Press/Phelan M. Ebenhack
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
