From Dean Smith to Hubert Davis – When ‘Doing It the Right Way’ Stopped Being Enough at UNC

College Basketball is a business. We’ve known it for a decade or more, and with things like NIL and the transfer portal, it seems like every few minutes it becomes even more of a business.

I’ve been a Tar Heel fan since before I had the ability to talk or walk. Growing up on Tobacco Road, you had to pick a side. We lived in Winston-Salem, home of Wake Forest University, but my parents had begun cheering for UNC, because they liked Coach Dean Smith. The way he did things aligned pretty closely with the way we thought it should be done.

My fandom was never truly fanatical, mostly just a social inclusion thing: I really wanted something to talk about at school. The rivalries were truly friendly, and gave me something to either be very excited about (thank you, 1993 team, for a great few weeks of bragging rights over the Duke fans in class my 8th grade year) or unhingedly angry at (I see you, Randolph Childress.)

The day I was accepted to be an incoming freshman in 1998 signaled a turning point. I had skin in the game, and began truly cheering for the Tar Heels, and scheduling my life around games. But even then, I was nowhere near the biggest fan I knew. I watched with slack-jawed awe when Weber State knocked us out of the tourney my freshman year. But most of my awe was at the way that it totally ruined the rest of Spring Break for my classmates.

Sure, it was bad, but there are worse things.

When I moved to Tennessee following graduation, I got as close as one might get to true fanaticism, but only because out there nobody cared about basketball. Aside from a handful of Kentucky fans, that was football country.

I still scheduled my life around Tar Heel games, and once called my brother who did play-by-play of the ending of a double-overtime game against Wake, because the local TV station switched over to the KY game, and “internet radio” was not yet a thing.

This time also coincided with what could be argued to be the very beginnings of the best decade in history to be a Tar Heel: I lived there from 2003 to 2005, and got to watch as UNC went from national champs in ’05 to turning around and getting 4 years of Tyler Hansbrough.

Through it all, I’ve been a fan because we did things the right way.

It’s gotten harder to be a fan of college athletics in general over the years. As the amount of revenue being created has skyrocketed, it’s just not as fun to watch. But still I remain a fan, mainly because I thought UNC could make it in this new world of college basketball while still doing things the right way.

A large part of my renewed fandom was literally embodied in the person of Hubert Davis. He was everything that was right about college athletics:

• Rode the bench for much of his freshman year.
• Was explicitly told by his head coach that he wasn’t going to get playing time.
• Worked insanely hard at improving his game.
• Became a believer in Christ through the ministry of faithful college ministers
• Earned his own spot in the starting lineup.
• Went on to a long career in professional basketball.
• Came back to the University when they asked him to, and served as an assistant for years.
• Stepped into an unenviable position of following a legend (who left because the game itself and the general job description had changed so much).
• Competed fiercely without profanity.

Hubert Davis was proof that we do things the right way.

He continued to prove it by filling his staff with faithful men who represented every era of UNC hoops.

Then he overachieved with a better record in his first 150 games than either Coach K or Dean Smith. He punctuated his time at the helm with signature wins against Duke (one of which is commemorated with a framed picture in my office!) where he retired both an arena and a man with back-to-back losses.

I said it that day: Hubert has earned his spot.

I literally do not care (though it does make me sad) that he lost the next game to Kansas in the championship. It didn’t change my opinion of him as a coach one iota.

But I get it. College basketball is driving too much revenue for coaches to be allowed to grow. There are too many advertiser dollars to be lost when you exit in the round of 64, and when you don’t consistently compete for ACC regular season titles.

There’s this myth out there that there’s some magic persona for a head coach that will drive immediate, consistent, elite excellence in collegiate athletics, despite that excellence being a moving target.

As a University, I thought we were above it. We knew that you could build championships on the backs of guys like Luke Maye or Theo Pinson as athletes, and on the backs of guys like Dean Smith and Hubert Davis as coaches.

I thought we’d finally cracked the magic code when the university went the Duke-route of piling up huge sums of cash to pay athletes, and thus attract the top talent.

We’d been through it before: there were folks calling for Dean’s job, folks calling for Roy’s job, etc. I thought we would read the calls for Hubert’s job in the same way: noise from the expensive seats. Bubba should have stood up for Hubert, and instead he caved to the pressure.

I had hope that the transition from Bubba to Steve would be a passing of the “Carolina way” torch and that we’d continue to do things the right way. Instead, Bubba sealed his legacy for me as “the one who ended the Carolina way” by hiring Bill Belichick and firing Hubert Davis.

I won’t ever watch a UNC basketball game with the same level of fandom. I’m going to get really into woodworking or something.

College basketball is a business, and I’m just not sure I’m a fan of this business. The wrong hire here completely loses me, and I’m not sure there is a right hire.

It’s a profoundly sad day to be a Tar Heel.