March Badness
All is Not Well by the Old Well
On Thursday, the North Carolina men’s basketball team lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament to 11th-seeded Virgina Commonwealth University. North Carolina has won more NCAA tournament games in history than anyone, and is tied for the second-most championships with six (although they hang a seventh banner from the 1920s in the Dean Dome). Despite being the bluest of blue bloods, this is the second straight year they have been eliminated in the first round. The year before that they failed to get a bid altogether; in 2022, they went to the championship game, losing to another blue blood, Kansas.
These four seasons comprise the resume of Hubert Davis’s tenure as head coach. And, unfortunately, while most schools would be delighted with three tournament bids and a championship game appearance, that is not the case in Chapel Hill. Word now is that Davis will be replaced with someone from outside the ‘family’ of UNC players and coaches who represent the legacy of Dean Smith. Davis is all that. The nephew of the great Walter Davis, whom I met in my parents’ house when the team was invited over for dinner, Hubert played for Dean at Carolina, had a solid career in the NBA, later working as an analyst before returning to Chapel Hill as an assistant. He is said to embody all the Smithian virtues: hard work, teamwork, unselfishness, sportsmanship, and, in the end, kindness albeit under a tough facade. If Davis is replaced by someone like, say, former Villanova coach Jay Wright, it will mark the end of a 65-year era. All the head coaches to succeed Smith: Bill Guthridge, Matt Doherty, Roy Williams (who had been a student of my father at UNC), and Davis all had deep ties to the UNC ‘family.’
Head coaches get fired all the time; they are the ultimate ‘at will’ employees. I generally have little sympathy for those guys who are paid many times the salary of even a university chancellor or president; job security is a luxury they do not require. However, it is worth marking this occasion by recalling that it was Dean Smith, the fearless Kansan, who integrated the sport in the South, and who was always a fierce champion of civil rights and unfailing practitioner of civil behavior. His successors shared his vision, and the players benefited greatly, succeeding both on and off the court after leaving UNC. They are not all Michael Jordan, to be sure, but they are to be found in diverse fields of endeavor such as education, business, journalism, and coaching. It is important at this juncture to acknowledge that legacy.
Of all the commentary I have seen in the last two days, the most ridiculous was, not surprisingly, a rant by ESPN gadfly Stephen A. Smith. According to him the problem with Davis is that he’s been letting down Duke by not sufficiently honoring their ‘sacred’ rivalry. He criticized Davis for losing the ‘recruiting war’ over Cameron Boozer, whose father played at Duke and whose given name is also the name of the fire trap in which that team plays. To be fair, that is exactly what ESPN pays Stephen A. for. Although a North Carolinian himself, he is no doubt too young to remember when NC State, not Duke, was Carolina’s arch rival.
Hubert Davis is a man in Dean Smith’s image, and I wonder how Dean Smith himself would have coped in the current era of million-plus NILs and relaxed rules on transfers. Things change and they require a new skill set; let’s just hope that the old virtues can endure.