Bill Belichick's Disastrous Media Tour, Part 2

It has gotten worse.

Yesterday, I wrote about Bill Belichick’s train wreck of an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. UNC Chapel Hill, where Belichick is now the head football coach, released a statement on his behalf. This is a good time to say, “I can’t even.” Here’s the statement:

There is so much to unpack here that it calls for bullet points:

• As a publicist, you can only do so much to ensure which topics are off-limits. The media can agree on principle, but in practice, those topics might still get broached. You can’t dictate what questions are asked during interviews—no journalist or media outlet would agree.

• Throwing your publisher and publicist under the bus is such bad form that I can’t even imagine dealing with it at this point in my career. That said, I deal with it plenty. I am not proud of this, but when I was VP of Publicity at Atria, a particular bestselling author was such a lunatic that my temper got the best of me and I threw my phone against the wall in my office. That was 2009, and believe me when I say my department was in solidarity with me (the same author terrorized every publicist in my department at the time, and my primary concern was protecting them). I’ve evolved as a human, so that would never happen now. Still, why drive your publicist to that place? We are human.

• Belichick is a control freak, and this attempt at damage control worsened things. Does he not understand that he is keeping the story in the news cycle?

• Your girlfriend is not your publicist or qualified to do that job. She’d know that her interjection would make it to TV if she were. Your publicist from Simon & Schuster is running the campaign, not your girlfriend. What job was she doing, exactly?

• CBS Sunday Morning and other magazine-style news programs often film for hours and edit the interview to fit the show. You do not have a say in the final edit.

• Even if Belichick is media-averse, the man needs media training. I’m sure he is resistant to it, so it’s a moot point, but he could’ve deflected the question about how he met Jordan Hudson (the girlfriend) easily if he had some training.

• Everything he has done since Sunday has deflected from his book. Get back on the media train and keep it moving. If the girlfriend question is asked in an upcoming interview, all he needs to say is, “I think CBS covered that.” Then laugh. They’ll move on.

• Are you kidding me with the line about not controlling the interview? You and Jordan were trying to control the interview. She should learn a lesson from this: great publicists have years of building skills to handle these situations. This is amateur hour. It’s not embarrassing to the publisher, publicist, or CBS. It is embarrassing to you and Jordan.

• If you made it public that you met on a flight, answer the question! Not hard.

• Finally, with love, stop talking. Stop posting statements. Stop. Redirect everything to the book. That might not be possible because you’ve created a big mess. That mess is your responsibility to clean up.

My condolences to the folks at Simon & Schuster and Avid Reader Press who have to deal with this nonsense.

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