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If Hubert Davis is on his way out, UNC will need to go outside ‘the family’ for its next basketball coach
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As North Carolina’s pathway to the NCAA Tournament continues to narrow, the heat on Hubert Davis continues to rise.
It’s only appropriate that in the aftermath of Saturday’s 1-point escape against Pittsburgh, the embattled Tar Heels coach suggested that his team needs to play with “a sense of emergency” rather than a sense of urgency as it enters the season’s home stretch.
After Monday night’s 85-65 beatdown at Clemson, it might be time to call 911.
UNC is a 4-alarm inferno with 5 losses in its past 7 games, including embarrassingly lopsided defeats against the ACC’s 2 best teams that helped drop its record to 14-11 (7-6 in the conference).
With the Tar Heels trending in the wrong direction at the wrong time and Davis trending on social media for all the wrong reasons, more than just the season might be on the verge of going up in smoke.
It doesn’t matter that the UNC System has suspended some of the athletic oversight from the Board of Trustees at its flagship campus to prevent a situation similar to the one that bullied athletic director Bubba Cunningham into hiring Bill Belichick as its new football coach.
The pressure on Cunningham to part ways with his 4th-year basketball coach has begun to intensify. And it will only get worse the closer the Tar Heels miss the NCAA Tournament for the 2nd time in 3 years. Unless Davis does everyone including himself and the school he loves so much a favor by reading the room and bowing out gracefully on his own.
Davis is a Tar Heel legend. The sharpshooter helped UNC win the ACC Tournament twice and reach the 1991 Final Four. He was the hand-picked successor to Hall of Famer Roy Williams. As difficult as the decision to move on from him would be, the next necessary step in the rebuilding process might be even more painful.
It wouldn’t just entail cutting ties with a former star player who bleeds Carolina blue. It would also signal a clean break from the history and tradition those in the courtside seats at Smith Center – and many others – hold dear.
The branch on the college basketball coaching tree that connects UNC directly to Dr. James Naismith. The guy with the peach baskets who invented the game.
Naismith served as a mentor to Kansas coaching legend Phog Allen, who passed his knowledge on to a young Jayhawk point guard named Dean Smith.
Smith then carved out his own niche in college basketball history by winning 879 games at UNC, more than any coach in history at the time of his retirement in 1997, before handing the job off to a succession of former assistants and players – Bill Guthridge, Matt Doherty, Williams and now Davis.
That family affair, however, is on its last legs.
With Jerod Haase having been fired at Stanford last year, Wes Miller not exactly lighting it up at Cincinnati and MJ content to play golf and just be MJ, there aren’t any viable heirs capable of continuing the dynasty. That means whenever the UNC job comes open – whether it’s next month or somewhere in the less immediate future – the hire will have to come from outside the “family.”
It’s way too early to start throwing out names since there’s still more than a month’s worth of games left to try and turn things around this season, And it’s still not certain that the Tar Heels will be in the market once it’s over.
If and when the time does come, though, the list of interested candidates will be impressive and long. Even in its current state, UNC is still a top-5 job.
The Tar Heel basketball brand is strong enough that it shouldn’t have to resort to an outside-the-box hire as extreme as the Belichick gamble to catch the attention of the national media. And more important, top-tier talent. The kind of first-round NBA Draft talent that’s more concerned with the “transactional” side of the game than the dusty banners hanging from the rafters of the arena they play in.
But it’s a problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing money at it. Assuming, of course, that there’s any money left to throw around after the bundle being promised to football.
UNC needs a basketball overhaul that goes beyond the recently addressed and long-overdue addition of a general manager to oversee the program. A change that better aligns it with the realities of the transfer portal and NIL, and helps to prevent it from falling into a similar malaise to the one that’s devalued Indiana from college basketball royalty to just another team in the Big Ten.
It’s a transition whose implementation requires a sense of urgency.
Before it becomes an emergency.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
