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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It’s taken almost three years for the answer to become apparent.
Rewind the clock that far, back to Hubert Davis’ introductory press conference as North Carolina’s head coach. What stands out? Maybe, even still, the shock of his predecessor’s retirement: Roy Williams abruptly calling it a career only days earlier, on (of all dates) April Fool’s. Or maybe you remember Davis’ crisp plaid suit — or more likely, the small circular pin he wore on the left lapel, black save for three capital, Carolina blue letters: DES, for Dean Edwards Smith, Davis’ college coach. But more than anything? What stood out then, and still endures today, was the guiding philosophy Davis outlined.
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“I’ve always wanted to walk the same road, the same path, as Coach Smith and Coach (Bill) Guthridge and Coach Williams,” Davis said then. “I’m so excited and humbled and thankful and appreciative and excited to be able to do it — with my own personality, and in my own shoes.”
The obvious follow-up question, then:
How would Davis do that?
How about like this? Davis, holding his wife Leslie’s hand, exiting Spectrum Center on Saturday, this time in a different baby blue sport coat… but wearing that same DES pin. They hugged the far side of a winding concrete hallway, weaving through throngs of reporters, headed for the team bus back to Chapel Hill — and beyond that, to the Sweet 16 in Los Angeles, where they will play No. 4 seed Alabama in Thursday’s West Regional semifinal. It’s the second time in three seasons Davis has led his alma mater this deep into the NCAA Tournament.
“More to be said. More to be done.”
-Coach Davis pic.twitter.com/wjLlWzJeB2
— Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) March 24, 2024
Only three other coaches in UNC’s illustrious history have done that: Smith, the patriarch of the program, who won two national titles and retired as the winningest coach in men’s college hoop history; Guthridge, Smith’s longtime assistant and eventual successor, who — as Davis is attempting to follow — went to two Final Fours in his first three seasons; and Williams, a three-time title-winner and the person who vouched hardest for him to get this position.
Understandably, Davis wanted to follow in their footsteps.
But doing so was always going to be harder than just hoping it happened.
It has taken, to use a classic Davis-ism, sunny and cloudy days. A national championship appearance in his first season … followed by a historic failure in his second: the first preseason No. 1 team to miss the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded in 1985.
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“In anything that you do, the more times that you do it, I think you become more comfortable,” Davis said recently. “You see the things that you like, the things you enjoy. The things that you don’t like. Things that may need to alter or tweak or adjust … I’ve never felt, whether I was a player or assistant coach or analyst, like I was there, (like) I know it all. And obviously three years in, I don’t know it all.”
Maybe not. But we do know one thing, unequivocally, three seasons into the Hubert Davis era in Chapel Hill — especially after these Tar Heels earned the program’s first ACC regular-season title and No. 1 seed since 2019:
The 53-year-old is not just some stand-in, a temporary steward for a program that Smith, Guthride, and Williams built. North Carolina is now unquestionably his, with Davis possessing the same authority as the men he models himself after. And the best part?
He’s not just following in their footsteps. He’s walking his own path.
In December 1999, early in Guthridge’s third season, North Carolina played a nonconference game at Buffalo. The only interesting thing about that 24-point blowout was that neither Brendan Haywood nor Joseph Forte — two pillars of the team’s Final Four berth later that season — started; it was the first game all year that they hadn’t.
But when asked why he had them come off the bench, Guthridge was unflinching: “Because I’m the head coach,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
Fast forward to October 2023, to UNC’s preseason media day. Davis was asked about the contract his players drafted the prior season — how they wanted to play offensively, defensively, what their non-negotiables were — and if they’d done so again. No, Davis told reporters. He’d drafted the contract this time, and made every player sign it. Why the change?
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“Because I’m the head coach,” Davis said, not smiling.
Message sent.
The similarities between Davis and his predecessors aren’t always quite that verbatim, but they’re plenty obvious. How Davis waves his players down the floor on a fast break, for instance, same as Smith and Williams used to. “I did steal that,” Davis admitted, grinning, before the ACC tournament, “because I thought it worked.” Or how, after two seasons of wearing athleisure for games, he now opts for a proper jacket. “It just draws me closer to the history and the foundation of what this place is all about,” Davis said, explaining his change in attire, “and the coaches that have been head coach before me.”
But it isn’t all copy-and-paste from the past. Take Davis’ closet, for instance. Blazers? Yes. But a tie? No — it simply wouldn’t work with his dramatic sideline gesticulations, how he pumps his fists and kicks out his feet for emphasis. “I’m a little active on the sidelines,” he said, “but having a sports coat means something to me.”
That’s a small way Davis could make Carolina tradition his own. But there has still been a learning process for a first-time head coach — like some of Davis’ early, much-maligned verbal miscues. Some in the UNC fan base still haven’t forgotten what he said about D’Marco Dunn and Dontrez Styles — the two freshmen he inherited from Williams’ final recruiting class — before his first season: “By the time they leave Carolina, they’re going to be (some) of the best players ever to play in Carolina history.”
Dunn averaged 7.4 minutes per game in two seasons before transferring to Penn State last summer. Ditto for Styles, who left for Georgetown after 45 appearances and only 264 total minutes.
Those comments came from a good place, but were ambitious — and ended up backfiring. Davis had to learn the same lesson, about judiciousness, on the recruiting trail. One of his first scholarship offers was to three-star developmental big man Will Shaver, who enrolled early, midway through the 2021-22 season. Shaver only played six minutes and scored two points as a redshirt freshman last season, never looking the part of an ACC-caliber player; he transferred to UAB.
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And even though Davis’ first team did make that miracle run — downing Mike Krzyzewski in his final home game at Duke and again in the Final Four — it took multiple embarrassing losses to get to that point. Blowouts vs. Tennessee, Kentucky, Wake Forest … and a rising cry from the fan base after each one, to cut Davis loose less than a year into the gig.
Then the winning started. Davis unlocked sharpshooter Brady Manek … and no one cared that he had scrapped UNC’s secondary break in the process. Along the way, Davis learned perhaps the most valuable lesson for any rookie coach: the balance between consistency and change.
Even Tom Izzo — a championship-winning coach whose Michigan State team UNC beat in the second round — went through it. After many years as an assistant under Hall of Famer Jud Heathcoate, Izzo succeeded his mentor in 1995. It wasn’t dissimilar to the transition from Williams to Davis … and neither was Izzo’s gut reaction upon sliding over one bench seat.
“When you get one of those jobs from guys who have been in it a long time, you always kind of say to yourself, I’m going to change this a little bit,” Izzo said. “I remember telling my secretary — who had been with Jud for 20 years and me as my years got into it — now I know why Jud did this. Now I know. I bet Hubert does the same thing. When you have the success Roy (did), I think tweaking the offense or defense or things like that is normal — and he should put his stamp on it. But I bet you he’ll run the program very similarly because, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Then Izzo, from atop a makeshift dais, smiled dryly.
“And it ain’t broke.”
Entering this NCAA Tournament, Davis stole one final page out of Smith’s old playbook. Rather than telling his team it had to win six straight games for a national championship, Davis broke it down into three groups of two.
Win the Charlotte Invitational … and then we’ll be invited to the Los Angeles Invitational.
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“That really resonated with me, with the whole team, because I know it’s hard,” said senior guard R.J. Davis. “If you look too far ahead, you kind of get distracted from what’s going on in the present moment.”
Beyond that, though? This season, and now this postseason run, has shone as much light on Davis’ ingenuity as at any previous point in his tenure. That aforementioned sideline demeanor? It is decidedly un-Williams-like, and Davis knows it. “I don’t know how Coach Williams sat down the whole game,” Davis joked. “I just can’t sit down there. I just get so excited.” Same deal with Davis’ wardrobe. “Hubert doesn’t wear those argyle golf sweaters that Roy wears,” Izzo quipped — nor did Williams wear the black Oura ring Davis does, so Leslie can track his heart rate in-game. He forgot to pack the charger when North Carolina went to Washington D.C. for the ACC tournament … so Leslie went out and bought a new one. “She does make fun of me, how animated I get on the sideline,” Davis said, “but I just don’t know how else to do it.”
Other differences are more dramatic. Davis said before March Madness that rapper Lil Durk was his favorite artist. Really? “I promise you he does,” R.J. Davis said of his head coach. The two even share music, sending one another songs from Rod Wave to YoungBoy and beyond. “If I send him a song and he doesn’t like it, he’ll let me know,” R.J. Davis added, laughing. “Just that type of relationship we have that goes beyond basketball.”
Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, or Roy Williams? No.
But Hubert Davis? Yes.
Some of those differences are just Davis’ personality, aspects of himself that he cannot stifle. But others are formed through his experiences — one in particular, which even Davis’ predecessors cannot claim:
Playing in the NBA.
Take Davis’ approach to scouting, for instance. When Smith was head coach, there basically was none. Smith “would just put a green dot on who could shoot,” Bacot recalled from Davis’ stories about the UNC legend, “and then a double green dot on somebody who could really shoot.” That was Williams’ proclivity until the mid-2000s or so, when he leaned into the scouting renaissance across the sport. But even then, according to Bacot — one of two players, along with R.J. Davis, still left from Williams’ final team — Williams only dished out scouting reports the day before games. “And then it was time to play,” Bacot said.
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Davis, on the other hand, gives his players their scouting report two and sometimes three days in advance. “We do a little personnel at first, so you can know your matchup,” Bacot said, “then we go through plays and actions, and then we go through ways to attack them.”
That’s the only way Davis knows, honed from his 12 years in the NBA. “My time in the NBA, scouting is just huge,” he said. “The scouting that we do is probably 5 percent of what is done in the NBA … Just the attention to detail in terms of scouting in the NBA is ridiculous.” Davis remembers his former professional coaches — legends like Pat Riley, Don Nelson, and Larry Brown — obsessing over the minutia, what a player’s proclivities were if he dribbled right vs. left. He could not unlearn that mindset, nor would it have been wise to — so he implemented a version of it in his program. (It helps dramatically that Davis has a former NBA assistant coach, Pat Sullivan, on his staff, too — and even more so because the two were college teammates in Chapel Hill.)
Along those same lines, as NBA coaches do, Davis is not afraid to call the same set over and over again if an opponent can’t stop it. He did so against Michigan State, spamming UNC’s Floppy Punch action in the second half, and the Spartans never figured out how to adequately defend it. Where Smith, Guthridge, and Williams were more inclined to rely on the Carolina break — the program’s storied transition offense — Davis views coaching through a somewhat different lens.
A lens, clearly, that works.
However far North Carolina ends up going in this tournament will of course be because of players like Bacot and R.J. Davis — but it also will be because of its coach, one increasingly cemented in his role. One year after a nightmare season for the ages, Hubert Davis has the Tar Heels right back where they belong, in the top tier of the college basketball hierarchy.
(Top photo: Jacob Kupferman / Getty Images)