Firing Bill Belichick would be very expensive
The Bill Belichick Era is off to a rocky start at UNC. Here’s what it would cost for the school to cut bait.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we talk about the start of the Bill Belichick Jordon Hudson Era in Chapel Hill.
By now you’ve almost certainly heard about football’s latest juicy scandal. It took all of ~24 hours for fans to drop Shedeur Sanders and focus instead on Bill Belichick, whose romantic relationship with a woman named Jordon Hudson has quickly become the weirdest, most bizarre story in sports.
Belichick is five decades older than the 24-year-old Hudson, but that’s somehow not the scandal. Beyond their romance, the two have also developed a professional relationship that is causing all sorts of drama. Hudson raised eyebrows when she helped out on the field during UNC’s spring game, and has been brought into much of Belichick’s official Tar Heels business as a publicist/partner/consultant. According to the New York Times, UNC’s deal to be featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks fell apart because of her involvement, and earlier this week she interfered in an on-camera interview Bill was giving to CBS after he was asked how they met.
This is concerning behavior for any 73-year-old man, but particularly so for one who reached the top of his profession by repeatedly convincing some of the world’s most famous athletes that distractions were the enemy of success.
It’s also no way to start a new job. Belichick and UNC shocked college sports late last year when they agreed on a five-year, $50 million deal to bring the six-time Super Bowl winning coach to Chapel Hill. The Hudson relationship has certainly caught the attention of higher-ups at the school. The New York Post reported this week that on campus there was a “growing sense this could become a problem.”
We’re not yet at the point where his job is in jeopardy, but we may not be far off. To see what that might entail, I gave a close read to his employment agreement with the university. Here’s what it says:
There are five main ways Belichick’s UNC deal can end—1) a new contract with UNC, 2) death, 3) Belichick quits, 4) UNC fires him for cause, and 5) UNC fires him without cause. Let’s look at those final two.
Fired For Cause
If Belichick is fired for cause, UNC would owe him just the money he’s already earned, so $0 additional dollars. To do this, the school would need to claim some breach of his contract, and while these employment agreements are typically worded so vaguely as to leave that door open—Belichick, for example, has fairly standard language around both ethics and integrity—it’s extremely rare for schools to do it.
This is true for a handful of reasons. Primarily, it would likely trigger a legal battle, and schools don’t want to be labeled among the coaching set as ‘not coach friendly.’ We’ve seen so many coaches fired “without cause” and paid hefty buyouts when it was clear that the school could have argued breach of contract. When LSU fired Ed Orgeron in 2021 after he protected multiple players accused of rape, he wasn’t fired for cause. That says it all.
One interesting clause in Belichick’s deal that could be relevant in the future is a two-paragraph section on page 21 that details confidentiality. If Belichick has indeed looped Hudson into his UNC work, and she’s not a university employee, the school could maybe eye that clause for possible breach. Here’s the relevant section:
I asked Sportico legal analyst, Michael McCann, to read that section. He said “under that test, pretty much any university employee could be found to violate the clause,” but agreed that the university would look “ridiculous” if it invoked it. Barring an even more bizarre turn in this saga, Bill Belichick is not being fired for cause. The university would need to pay him on the way out.
Fired Without Cause
Fired without cause is the school’s more standard out. If he’s fired tomorrow without cause, the school would need to pay him everything he’s owed on the contract up to December 31, 2027. I calculate that as roughly $26.66 million.
That would be among the largest buyouts in college football history, but nowhere near the largest. Texas A&M owed Jimbo Fisher $76.8 million (!) when he was fired in 2023.
To put the $26.66 million into UNC context, that’s almost exactly what UNC sold in tickets to football and men’s basketball combined last year. That total is $28.9 million.
Again, all of this is a bit speculative. As bizarre as the Jordon Hudson story is, a lot more would need to happen for UNC to fire the most famous football coach on the planet before his first game. And if they did, lawyers would almost certainly be involved.
But crazier things have happened. Like this guy, turning into this guy.
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: While trying to understand what’s happening with Chapel Bill, I remembered that Belichick was the one NFL coach not to join the coaches’ union, which is why he was the one NFL coach not depicted in Madden NFL games. He was the one NFL coach to not follow sideline gear guidelines, including when everyone else wore military appreciation paraphernalia. He regularly made a mockery of NFL injury reports, once listing Tom Brady as “probable “ for 70 straight weeks. He even seemed to make draft picks out of spite, taking players well before the so-called “experts” had them slotted to go. He has always seemed to disdain outside experts, writers, league bigwigs—anybody that tried to tell him what to do. Likely only more so now, after spending a year being rejected by the league he once ruled.
When you combine extreme contrarianism with decades of success, it can be easy to discredit public opinion, even if it’s right for once. It can be easy to start doing some truly weird stuff. Now divorced from his star quarterback and the Patriots owner he once worked for, there’s no one left to reel Bill Belichick back in 🎣.
I imagine he has responded to all of this outcry and concern and criticism with a simple shrug. And a smirk.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.