Bill Belichick, one of the winningest coaches in N.F.L. history, and currently the head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took the title of his new book, “The Art of Winning,” from “The Art of War,” an ancient Chinese treatise about military strategy, attributed to Sun Tzu.

But he drew inspiration, apparently, from a woman named Jordon Hudson, whom he calls, in the book’s acknowledgements, his “idea mill and creative muse.”

Belichick’s fondness for “The Art of War” is well known: for a time, the only sign in the New England Patriots’ locker room was a quote from it—“Every battle is won before it is fought”—and he liked to refer to Sun Tzu when explaining his coaching principles.

But it’s his fondness for Hudson that, lately, has made him the talk of TMZ. Hudson, Belichick’s girlfriend, is not just an idea mill; she is also a twenty-four-year-old ex-cheerleader, the second runner-up in the 2025 Miss Maine pageant, and a former philosophy student at Bridgewater State University.

She met Belichick on a JetBlue flight, in 2021; he wrote her a note and an autograph in a textbook she was reading (“Deductive Logic,” by the Harvard professor Warren Goldfarb).

He was sixty-nine at the time; she was, reportedly, twenty, though some sleuthing by the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” suggests that she may have been nineteen. They reportedly started dating two years later.

Now, according to public records unearthed by the Washington Post, Hudson is also the manager of several companies apparently associated with Belichick, including All BB Team L.L.C., Coach Show L.L.C., and Chapel Bill L.L.C.

Torre, the journalist and podcast host, has referred to Hudson as Belichick’s de-facto agent. In an e-mail from December, 2024, to officials at U.N.C., Hudson called herself the chief operating officer of Belichick Productions, too.

That particular job doesn’t seem to be working out too swimmingly. “Hard Knocks,” the football docuseries on HBO produced by N.F.L.

Films, was reportedly set to feature U.N.C.—the first time the series would focus on a college team. But, days before the official announcement was set to happen, the deal fell apart, and Hudson, according to the Athletic, “played an instrumental role in stopping the production.”

Belichick has pushed back against any suggestion that Hudson has been heavily involved in his coaching job. But his actions suggest a different story: at one point, he requested that Hudson be cc’d on U.N.C. e-mails to him.

Belichick and Hudson are consenting adults; love is love; etc. What’s really shocking is that Bill Belichick has ceded this much control to anyone. The Patriots’ old motto was “Do your job,” not “Let a social-media influencer do your job.”

Belichick now says that Hudson deals with “the business things” so that he can concentrate on football—but this is a man who spent two days in the run-ups to Super Bowls thinking about hotel and travel arrangements for his players. It is even more surprising that he has become the center of a media frenzy.

As a coach, Belichick famously loathed distractions from football, and much of “The Art of Winning” is a lesson in minimizing them.

“To help them focus on what matters, I like to tell my players and coaches to think about ‘the drawer,’ ” he writes. “Whether real or imagined, the drawer is the place where they can put every nonessential task, responsibility, and commitment so that their focus can be purely on doing their jobs.” There is not a drawer, apparently, big enough to fit Jordon Hudson, C.O.O.

Then again, maybe there shouldn’t be. Belichick’s ruthlessness, his overwhelming commitment to victory as the only essential thing—even at the cost of other tasks, responsibilities, and commitments—has made him a great coach, or at least a very successful one.

The end of his tenure with the Patriots was characterized by losses on the field and misery in the locker room. After he left the team, there were reports that he was frustrated in the restless pursuit of another coaching gig.

Not that misery and frustration were necessarily bad things, in Belichick’s view—he defends habitual dissatisfaction and high expectations as marks of good leadership, and doesn’t apologize for his style. “One thing I know about humans is that punishment works,” he writes in his book.

Well, O.K., if that’s your thing. But there is something Shakespearean about the turn his life has taken, something out of “Richard II” or “King Lear.” He has eight Super Bowl rings, six from his time as head coach of the Patriots, but those rings don’t seem to have given him much satisfaction, much peace, or much direction. They haven’t kept him warm at night.

And the swirling rumors, the leaks and the embarrassments, are self-inflicted and preventable. It’s not clear that he realizes this. “If somebody uses A.I. to summarize this book down to three essential words,” he writes, “I hope they are: Don’t. Commit. Penalties.” Somebody tell him!

Before long, the college-football season will begin. What all this drama has meant for Belichick’s prospects in the college game—how it’s affected his ability to recruit, develop, and lead young players—remains to be seen. Maybe the team will start winning, and all the distractions will be forgotten, reduced to a weird little chapter in the story of so much triumph. Maybe Hudson and Belichick will prove to have a brilliant partnership, and she’ll become a media mogul. Maybe Belichick has decided to turn his life into contemporary performance art.

It might be time for him to rethink his principles. Or maybe it’s time for Belichick to open those drawers, and to darn all those sweatshirts. ♦