After historic NCAA tournament meltdown, does UNC need to cut bait with Hubert Davis?
· Yahoo Sports
North Carolina can either keep Hubert Davis another year as head coach or it can get serious about its basketball program, but it cannot do both.
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If the Tar Heels’ 82-78 loss Thursday to VCU in the NCAA tournament is the catalyst for a coaching change that is so obviously necessary, it will be a small price to pay. But if North Carolina’s administration continues to make excuses for Davis because of a fluke national championship game appearance four years ago, it’s fair to ask whether one of the biggest brands in college sports cares more about winning or protecting a subpar coach because he was Roy Williams’ handpicked successor.
Have the standards at North Carolina been lowered to such an extent that Davis can come back for a sixth season without repercussions? Do the boosters and administrators in Chapel Hill really believe, after watching Davis put a mediocre product on the floor for three straight years, that he’s the guy who can get their program back into the national title mix the way it should be every year?
They can justify it all if they choose. They can focus on Caleb Wilson’s broken thumb, which undeniably ruined North Carolina’s chances of a deep tournament run. They can cling to the 2022 tournament when Davis’ team got hot at the right time, made the Final Four as a No. 8 seed and delivered the ultimate bragging-rights victory by beating Duke in Mike Krzyzewski’s final game. They can even go back to 2024, when North Carolina won the ACC regular season title but lost in the Sweet 16 as a No. 1 seed to Alabama.
At some point, though, the body of evidence is undeniable. North Carolina can have a nice program with Davis at the helm and hope to get lucky every so often in the tournament. It is unlikely to have an elite one.
How bad was Thursday for North Carolina?
The Tar Heels led by 14 points with 6½ minutes to go and lost (they were up 19 at one point, making this the largest first-round comeback in NCAA tournament history). They scored their 70th point with 7:11 left in regulation and finished with 78, including overtime. They had a two-point lead and the ball with 28 seconds left and committed a five-second violation on an inbounds play, allowing VCU to tie the game. And then, inbounding again with eight seconds remaining, Davis called a timeout to draw up a no-hope play that ended with big man Henri Veesaar getting the ball way out on the perimeter where he couldn’t do anything with it except turn it over.
Every moment of that meltdown should scream to North Carolina administrators that they don’t have the right guy in charge if the goal is to win a national championship.
But hope and familiarity are powerful drugs, and North Carolina hasn’t exactly been the model of administrative competence over the last few years. Sure, they were ruthless when it came to football coach Mack Brown, unceremoniously ushering him out when they they got a sniff that Bill Belichick was interested in coaching college football.
But North Carolina football is a program with no emotional attachment for the powerbrokers there. At Carolina, basketball isn’t business, it’s family.
From Dean Smith to Bill Guthridge to Matt Doherty to Williams and now Davis, there has been an unbroken lineage connecting past to present. For better or worse – and mostly for the better – the last 65 years of Tar Heel basketball can trace its roots to the same tree.
At some point, though, the well runs dry. And North Carolina needs to ask itself the following question: Has Davis done anything as head coach that a couple dozen others (or more) wouldn’t be able to do?
The answer, of course, is no. If North Carolina is truly one of the three or four best jobs in college basketball, this isn’t good enough. And it needs to look outside the family to get back where it belongs.
Davis is, by all accounts, a wonderful human being. He was a great player in Chapel Hill, a leader in the NBA, a TV star and a good assistant coach. He’s a great representative of the things North Carolina values. He treats people well. His colleagues in the athletic department adore him.
But in this era of college basketball, it shouldn’t be considered some great achievement at North Carolina to get a couple big-time hits in the transfer portal like Veesaar (from Arizona) or Jarin Stevenson (from Alabama) and a five-star recruit like Wilson. That’s the baseline of roster building at a school that aspires to win it all.
Yes, it was a tough break that Wilson got hurt because he was undeniably one of the best players in the country before his injury. But that doesn’t mean a first-round loss to VCU should be waved away when the coaching flaws that led to it are so obvious, never mind the general mediocrity North Carolina has been mired in over the past four seasons.
Here are the actual records since the 2022 title game:
2023 - 20-13 (no NCAA tournament)
2024- 29-8 (Sweet 16)
2025 - 23-14 (first-round loss)
2026 - 24-9 (first-round loss)
That’s one conference regular season title, zero ACC tournament titles and two NCAA tournament victories in four years.
A program with the reach and resources of North Carolina shouldn’t rationalize that failure or wave it away. It should hold someone accountable and figure out what needs to change.
In this case, there isn’t much mystery. Davis has had five years to establish himself as a worthy steward of the Carolina brand and has taken it backward. North Carolina’s administration can either face that reality now or tell their fan base that even a brutal, embarrassing loss to VCU isn’t worth causing family trouble.