Yeah. UNC and UNC alone is to blame for this becoming a circus. The media can't report on something- or turn something into tabloid fodder- without being given the ammunition to do so in the first place, and UNC's decision to hire a 73-year-old who was openly dating a 23-year-old who inserts herself into her boyfriend's professional life, while having the entire search process be publicly laid bare as a colossal shitshow with tons of institutional infighting, provided plenty of ammunition. As farce said above, any serious football program/school would have dealt with the problem swiftly and quietly before it ever became an opportunity for a media feeding frenzy.
As someone who spent 4 years in the football program at UNC and as someone who has been a "Carolina football first" ever since I first became a sports fan, I always get a chuckle out of folks who think that UNC football has some long laundry list of haters and foes who are working incessantly to keep the program down. The only people besides us UNC folks who remotely give a flying Fig Newton about UNC football are NC State fans, and nobody outside of Wake County even knows they exist in the first place. We as an institution do far more to "keep Carolina football down" than any outside entity ever could. I'm obviously hopeful that this whole Belichick gamble works out for UNC, but my expectations are certainly tempered (and it has far more to do with UNC itself than it does with Bill Belichick, FWIW, and has exactly zero to do with Jordon Hudson).