How 2025 Became the Year of the College Sports FOIA Request

There are some of us predisposed to wake most mornings, reach for our iPhones on the nightstand, open the latest AM edition of the D1.ticker newsletter, and deliberate over what sports-related public records requests we should send—and to which university.

It is not a life for everyone. But for a certain compulsive type of information gatherer—hello!—it works. Or it is our work. However, if 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that this once-bespoke club is rapidly expanding beyond its traditional ranks of eggheads, nerds, wet blankets, muckrakers, basement-dwellers and haters (aka journalists)—though some of those contingents are growing too.

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This culmination was made all too clear recently when Jordon Hudson, the girlfriend of North Carolina head football coach Bill Belichick and a frequent subject of public records requests, apparently decided if she couldn’t beat ’em, she should join ‘em.

On Dec. 3, Hudson filed a records request with UNC for emails sent by Robbi Pickeral Evans, the school’s top athletic communications official, related to an infamously awkward 60 Minutes segment on Belichick that ran in the spring.

Hudson’s dalliance with North Carolina’s public records law came to light thanks to David Covucci, the proprietor of the recently launched newsletter FOIAball. In just a few months, Covucci has run an absolute clinic in deploying state sunshine statutes to expose the inner workings of athletic departments. Among Covucci’s many discoveries were documents showing how athletic conferences lobby the College Football Playoff selection committee; how UCLA engineered a tax-deductibility workaround for football donors; and how the Department of Homeland Security surveils crowds at college football games.

Covucci, previously a tech and politics journalist, is not the first person to try a college sports media platform on this kind of work. There’s Matt Brown, my former colleague, who has scaled his Extra Points newsletter through relentless public records reporting, emerging along the way as the leading authority on EA Sports’ long-awaited return to college football video game-making.

Fan media has also been encouraged to join in the fun, as demonstrated when a Belligerent Beavs Oregon State podcast host successfully crowd-funded to pay for the exorbitant copying fees his alma mater charged in response to his request.

As this new breed of college sports FOIAer has entered the scrum, one of the practice’s standard-bearers bid farewell, at least for now. On Oct. 31, USA Today sports project reporter Steve Berkowitz—custodian of the paper’s exhaustive databases on athletic department budgets and college coach compensation—announced on X his voluntary retirement after more than a quarter-century spent meticulously FOIAing the money. True to form, Berkowitz’s final news tweet, on Oct. 28, informed the world that Kennesaw State head football coach Jerry Mack had just triggered a $25,000 bonus after the Owls won their sixth game by beating UTEP.

In departing, Berkowitz leaves behind an ecosystem in which public records requests have become not just a reporting tool, but a central battleground in college sports power struggles.

Last month, Conference USA filed a public records lawsuit against departing member Louisiana Tech after claiming the school had illegally withheld documents that would show the timeline of its decision to leave for the Sun Belt. Days later, former New Mexico State athletic director Mario Moccia filed suit against his former school, alleging both wrongful termination and violations of public records laws.

Will Jordon Hudson follow suit if her request is denied?

Even before she started submitting FOIAs, Hudson had pushed the university’s office of public records to full tilt, as it scrambled to keep pace with the wave of local and national media attention surrounding a football program that had claimed the mantle as college football’s most reliable soap opera.

In March, just a few months after Belichick took the Tar Heels job, Matt Hartman of The Assembly obtained an email from the previous December in which Belichick asked Pickeral Evans to copy Hudson on any future messages she sent to him. Then, in April, The Athletic’s Matt Baker uncovered a broader trove of emails involving Belichick, Hudson and UNC communications staff. In one exchange, Belichick reacted to what Hudson described as “slanderous commentary” on UNC football’s social media, writing to Hudson, “I cannot believe that UNC would support my being called a ‘predator.’”

UNC’s public records apparatus soon took center stage in the Tar Heel vivisections of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the investigative sports podcast led by the former ESPN and Sports Illustrated journalist. In early May, Pablo Torre dropped the dual bombshell claims that Hudson had been banned from UNC’s football facility and that family members of Belichick worried about her “detrimental” impact on his legacy and reputation. The first claim drew a swift, if carefully worded, denial from the school, followed months later by Hudson’s threat of litigation, which has yet to materialize.

Torre, for his part, publicly chastised the school for failing to respond to numerous outstanding records requests that would shed light on his reporting, and threatened to file a public records lawsuit. That, too, has not materialized.

But there’s been plenty of other legal developments this year on the college sports FOIA front.

In March, the Illinois attorney general’s public access bureau ordered the University of Illinois to turn over a copy of the Big Ten’s media rights deal to Michael Leroy, a U of I law professor and public records maven. Meanwhile, the University of Illinois failed in its effort to short-circuit a FOIA lawsuit I filed over messages exchanged by the school’s president on a messaging platform that the conference had set up, seemingly in no small part, to circumvent public disclosure.

With public schools now directly paying players thanks to the House v. NCAA settlement, this year saw an emerging battle over how much the public is entitled to know about those expenditures. As I’ve previously argued, these disclosures not only benefit the public, but the athletes as well.

In South Carolina, Frank Heindel, a retired grain merchant-turned-FOIA-advocate, has been taking the fight to the Gamecocks over its revenue-share payments. In October, a state court judge ruled that University of South Carolina must turn over at least some of the records related to its House-related expenditures.

Unfortunately, it isn’t the only public institution adopting such a recalcitrant stance.

Last month, I wrote about my own lack of success in trying to obtain even the most basic aggregated data on athlete pay from roughly a dozen leading FBS universities. Subsequently, Matt Brown reported he had a little more success securing similar information from smaller Division I schools. Even so, this falls well short of the level of transparency that is warranted.

The forces of opacity are always strong, and as the year draws to a close, I worry that the future of college sports is becoming needlessly—and deliberately—obscure, especially as schools build out new (ostensibly separate) legal entities to support novel forms of athletic investment.

That concern only sharpened last week, when the University of Utah became the first school to agree to directly partner with a private equity firm, Otro Capital, as part of an initiative to spin off its athletic revenue streams into a co-owned entity called Utah Brands & Entertainment.

“Because Utah Brands & Entertainment is a creation of the university’s private foundation, it is not a public or government entity,” a university spokesperson wrote in an email. “So any records of the company would not be subject to public records laws.”

This strikes me as more than problematic. But I suppose that fight will have to wait until 2026.

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