BOSTON — Former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick is speaking out after a recent interview ignited a storm of commentary online.

The interview was conducted by CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil and aired on CBS Sunday Morning.

The interview started off with Dokoupil noticing Belichick wearing a sweatshirt with a conspicuously large hole in it. And that was only the beginning.

“This situation, it was awkward from moment one until the end,” said Anjali Bal, associate professor of sports marketing at Babson College. “Every question they seemed to ask ended in an awkward response.”

Bal said she has never seen an interview quite like it.

“It seemed like Belichick didn’t really know what his own PR world was,” Bal said. “When he started to ask questions about like Instagram, I think he called it ‘Insta-Face’ or whatever it was, he didn’t even seem to know about it. When they were like, well how do you feel about this attention, he’s like I don’t even know about the attention.”

Bill Belichick’s girlfriend Perhaps the most talked about moment came not from Belichick himself, but from the involvement of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson.

At one point, Dokoupil asked how the couple met, and Hudson abruptly shut the topic down: “We’re not talking about this,” she quickly jumped in.

Social media users latched onto the dynamic between the 73-year-old coach and Hudson, calling it “strange” and “controlling.

On Wednesday, Belichick put out the following statement:

“I agreed to speak with CBS Sunday Morning to promote my new book, “The Art of Winning – Lessons from My Life in Football.” Prior to this interview, I clearly communicated with my publicist at Simon & Schuster that any promotional interviews I participated in would agree to focus solely on the contents of the book.

Unfortunately, that expectation was not honored during the interview. I was surprised when unrelated topics were introduced, and I repeatedly expressed to the reporter, Tony Dokoupil, and the producers that I preferred to keep the conversation centered on the book.

After this occurred several times, Jordon, with whom I share both a personal and professional relationship, stepped in to reiterate that point to help refocus the discussion.

She was not deflecting any specific question or topic but simply doing her job to ensure the interview stayed on track. Some of the clips make it appear as though we were avoiding the question of how we met, but we have been open about the fact that Jordon and I met on a flight to Palm Beach in 2021.

The final eight-minute segment does not reflect the productive 35-minute conversation we had, which covered a wide range of topics related to my career. Instead, it presents selectively edited clips and stills from just a few minutes of the interview to suggest a false narrative – that Jordon was attempting to control the conversation – which is simply not true.”

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ABC7 Chicago contributed to this report.