Hot Seat Speculation Continues For UNC’s Hubert Davis

Talent is a must for any coach, but what you do with it and how you manage it is also critical.

We posted earlier this week about the Triangle basketball dynamics potentially being upended by Will Wade’s arrival at NC State. And of course it hasn't happened yet and might not. It might however, and it’s been a literal lifetime since both Duke and NC State were better than UNC at the same time - early 1960’s, to be exact.

We pointed to the pressure that would put on UNC’s Hubert Davis and suggested his seat was warming up.

Davis called for UNC to up the ante for the basketball team and give him much more NIL support, which he got, plus a GM, Jim Tanner, who is getting $850,000 a year.

As Tim Donnely points out, that kind of investment demands results and many people don’t think that Davis got a good return out of the portal.

He did get Henri Veesaar from Arizona, Jarin Stevenson from Alabama, Jaydon Young from Virginia Tech, Jonathan Powell from West Virginia and Kyan Evans from Colorado State.

And he also brings in freshmen Caleb Wilson, Isaiah Dennis, Derek Dixon and in a late coup, Luka Bogavac, a promising European.

All of this assumes that Davis is a competent X-and-O guy, which he may be. He should have learned a lot from Dean Smith, when he played for him, and Roy Williams, for whom he toiled as an assistant.

You can argue a lot about how he manages roles and there have been controversies about that every year, but give him a mulligan there. He’s had good but not Smith or Williams-level talent. Last year for instance, he felt obliged to go with four guards for a good bit of the season.

We’d argue that the bigger question for Davis is communication skills. Remember Caleb Love being stunned when Davis told him he didn’t know what his role would be if he stayed? Remember Elliot Cadeau’s family being rather sharp-tongued about how he was treated? We didn’t get the sense that Ian Jackson or Ven-Allen Lubin left with good feelings and you may remember that in his final season, Armando Bacot, rather than surging, inexplicably regressed.

All of this goes back to the coach. Davis is universally regarded as a good guy and we’ve said before that we find him likable.

The evidence suggests that he doesn’t have great people skills and may lack the psychological insights needed to coach at a high level.

As we’ve also noted previously, Bubba Cunningham has made three questionable hires: Mack Brown, who came out of retirement to return to Chapel Hill, Bill Belichick, also near the end of his career, who brings awkward questions about his relationship with Jordon Hudson who is 49 years younger, and of course Davis.

With dynamic young coaches at Duke and State, there is as much pressure on Cunningham as there is on Davis. And if Davis goes and he survives, he’s probably going to be the guy who finally has to go outside the family to hire his next coach. Smith himself told Williams that if he didn’t take the job in 2003, UNC would pursue Rick Majerus.

It’s fascinating to think of who UNC would pursue if Davis gets canned. Let’s consider some possibilities.

1. Wes Miller. The last meaningful Smith disciple, Miller has not excelled at Cincinnati, which makes him a hard sell. The Smith nostalgia though might still get him the job.
2. Todd Golden. He’s built a monster at Florida, but the scandal about his alleged behavior towards female students at Florida has not entirely gone away. Florida finessed it because it was a Title IX investigation but never actually said there’s nothing here. It’s going to get interesting if anyone files a civil suit and discovery reveals details about what actually happened. If those things did happen, they’re likely to happen again and thus hiring him is a major risk.
3. Nate Oats. He would fit the bill in many ways, but that whole murder thing swirling around his program would be a tough sell. Still, UNC fans want to keep up and if State fans can accept Wade’s cheating, UNC fans will find a way to excuse what happened in Tuscaloosa and how Oats dealt with it, which was not impressive - not even slightly.
4. Grant McCasland. He’s only in his third season at Texas Tech, but he fills the bill in many ways. The guy clearly knows what he’s doing. Bonus: he’s 48 and could stay for 20 years. Con: he’s a Texan and getting him out of the Lone Star State won’t be easy. But UNC vs. Texas Tech? It’s a huge platform. Texas Tech will always be football first.
5. Scott Drew. Baylor hasn’t made it out of the first weekend since winning it all in 2020-21 but that team...OMG. Another guy who may not want to leave his perch though. You have to ask. Bonus: he appears to be squeaky clean.
6. TJ Otzelberger. He’s really good but he’s never gotten past the first weekend in March. And if UNC goes outside the fam, they’re looking for the 21st century version of Frank McGuire. He’s probably working in Raleigh now but you get the idea.
7. Mick Cronin. He’s sick of UCLA’s heavy travel as a Big Ten member. His style is hard-nosed but boring. Probably a poor fit.
8. Russell Turner. He’s not the next McGuire, but he is a rising star who has done tremendously well at UC Irvine. As a former Wake assistant, he knows the ACC culture.
9. Mike Morrell. Succeeding at UNC-Asheville is not easy and he’s done that. Someone is going to take that chance.
10. Eric Olen. He did a brilliant job at UC San Diego, but New Mexico snatched him up after this past season. Still, UNC is a major jump and he might take it.
11. It took us to the bottom of this list to realize the natural answer: UConn’s Dan Hurley. Why? On the one hand, he’s most at home in the Northeast. On the other, he had a very difficult time as a young man coming to term with brother Bobby’s immense success at Duke. He’s repeatedly jabbed at Duke recently, trying to schedule the Blue Devils. We’re convinced that part of that is his desire to work that psychological battle out once and for all. The Hurley brothers are extremely close but having to contend with Bobby’s legacy has never been easy for Dan. What better way to bury it than to take the UNC job and try to surpass Duke? And UNC fans, naturally and understandably, would love the flex. And given Hurley’s volatile nature and his New Jersey roots, he’s as close a parallel to McGuire as anyone could be. The slickest move would be to fire Cunningham, hire UConn’s David Benedict and let Benedict pursue Hurley.

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