If a new NFL door opens to Bill Belichick, there’s suddenly a lot of non-football drama to squeeze through it

Nearly 15 months ago, when the Atlanta Falcons passed on Bill Belichick, it was strictly about football business.

His departure from the New England Patriots had come with red flags, and there were Falcons executives who questioned whether Belichick could step out of a single-minded leadership silo and blend into a broader decision-making collective. The concerns were about elements of football, personality and relationships inside the team’s building. The one thing nobody really worried about was non-football drama because, for the most part, Belichick was mostly devoid of it. Even when his outside life came into the media’s field of vision, it typically faded back into the background fairly quickly.

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Now, more than ever, it’s fair to wonder if that’s going to be the case with this version of Belichick, whose off-field relationship with girlfriend Jordon Hudson is seemingly becoming as big a part of the coach’s public profile as his football accomplishments. And more than ever, it’s also fair to wonder how an NFL that bypassed him for two straight offseasons is going to absorb that growing reality.

This isn’t a column that’s gawking at the relationship between Belichick and Hudson, who have an age difference that has driven a significant amount of media attention. Instead, it’s about recognizing that the attention — and scrutiny — is only growing in magnitude, drawing in a vast amount of mainstream media attention, including from Yahoo, that has begun to approach celebrity-couple levels. And now that attention is transitioning into a type of drama that we have not historically associated with Belichick.

For decades, the overarching belief was that Belichick’s existence was rooted in keeping the main thing the main thing. And that main thing, for the majority of time, was related to some aspect of football. There were some exceptions — from Belichick’s friendship with President Donald Trump, to the Ring video camera snippet shot around the world, to … yes … some of his previous relationship developments. But very little of that ever had long-term traction that became a larger part of the Belichick package. At the end of the day, football overshadowed everything else.

From the outside looking in, it seemed that he wanted it that way. Now? Belichick’s outside life is taking up part of the stage, too. More than we ever would have believed.

Most of it is benign, of course. The Instagram photos and other social media posts — that are clearly getting the mainstream attention they seek; and once again, also from Yahoo — have certainly shown a side of Belichick we are unaccustomed to. But aside from unsolicited opinions about his personal life — and there’s no shortage of those — it’s not all that different than a wide spectrum of celebrity life that we have been rubbernecking about since the invention of celebrity life.

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What’s different here for the NFL — and more specifically most team owners who hire head coaches — is there’s an added field of context coming into play. Think of it this way: As a head coach and leader of an organization, Belichick was known to be a lot to handle when it came to his demanding, single-minded football nature. We saw that in his relationships with players, who have often spoken about the love/hate relationship they had with him over their careers. We saw it in his relationships with his personnel executives, often in broad stroke behind-the-scenes accounts in books about the Patriots’ success. We saw it laid out in Belichick’s own words when discussing his time working for Bill Parcells. And most recently, we’ve seen it in his passive-aggressive relationship with Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose name doesn’t appear in a single page of Belichick’s new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football.” Apparently none of those lessons in his life of football had anything to do with the club owner who employed him for 24 years. Or at least not enough to acknowledge Kraft’s existence in the lifespan of his coaching career.

In the context of all of that, Belichick’s greatness was defined by his drive, expectations and success. Underline that word success, because once that success vanished in New England, the context of his strained relationships changed, too. Most especially with Kraft. For decades, the juice was worth the squeeze — until it wasn’t. It was a reality that played into teams passing on him after his departure from the Patriots.

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But the one field of context nobody ever really had to worry about was Belichick’s personal life. First, it really wasn’t all that fascinating on a day-to-day basis — or at the very least, it blended in with the furniture. Second, his personal life never really sought outside attention. Not from the media and most certainly not on social media. And third, when his outside life got attention, it had a residue of drama that never really lasted. Especially when he was winning football games.

This time around, it feels different.

All of the sudden, Belichick’s personal life has become a tangle of different threads that are now a larger part of the perception of him — from the celebrity vantage, the gawking vantage and the straight up drama of how he’s being presented from one moment to the next. In the past several months, there have been multiple instances where reporting on Belichick the coach has necessitated touching on his private (but also very public) relationship with Hudson. From her allegedly factoring into the NFL Films decision to dump the “Hard Knocks” UNC series, to Hudson emerging as “Chief Operating Officer of Belichick Productions” in the middle of a deep dive about how his image is being crafted at North Carolina, to the most recent back-and-forth fallout over a CBS interview with Belichick that went sideways and then very distinctly pointed a finger at Hudson as the reason why it happened.

For an NFL icon who went to UNC to build a program and get back to coaching, the outside world knows far more about his personal life than it does about what he’s doing with the Tar Heels. Historically, I think Belichick would call that kind of thing a distraction. And also historically, I know Belichick has not been a fan of distractions. And yet, here we are.

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Of course, winning can cover for distractions and make drama more tolerable. In a few months, Belichick is going to have an opportunity to win and push everything else into the background. Maybe even enough to convince an NFL team to open a door to him again next year, when he turns 74. But there’s no denying that this version of Belichick has a lot more to fit through that portal.

It’s not just about football and nothing else anymore.