In the end, family was sacrosanct. Hubert Davis played for Dean Smith, and that’s like shaking Frank Sinatra’s hand. It cannot be faked or replicated. You either did or didn’t.
There was more than that, obviously: Davis becomes North Carolina’s first, and long overdue, Black football or basketball coach, and he had the crucial backing of his predecessor, Roy Williams.
But the lineage that goes back to Frank McGuire, back to Smith and now back to Williams, remains uninterrupted with Davis’ promotion into the head job Monday.
Whether that should have mattered as much as it did, whether that made Davis a better candidate than UNC Greensboro’s Wes Miller or anyone else out there who has actually been a college head coach, is almost immaterial. It’s essential to what makes North Carolina basketball different from other programs. If it’s the best job in the country, as athletic director Bubba Cunningham said with some justification, that lineage and everything it represents is a big reason why.
Cunningham interviewed several coaches with ties to the UNC program and among them only Davis had not been a college head coach. But he was more closely tied to North Carolina, as a distinguished player and assistant coach, than any of them.
That’s not the only reason why Davis is taking over at his alma mater, but it’s the one thing Davis had on his side more strongly than any of other candidate. In any comparison, Davis came out ahead of everyone in that category, and perhaps not in as many others.
He has not been a college or NBA head coach. He went straight from the NBA into broadcasting, and from there back to North Carolina. It’s a promotion that leaves itself open to second-guessing for all of those reasons.
But he has been groomed for this moment for almost a decade, years of speculation now affirmed, and when it came to a UNC coaching tree whose branches have mostly either withered or have yet to fully bud, Davis had stronger roots than anyone.
That he assumes a job that to this point has only been held by white men, about all that has to be said is it’s time. Time indeed.
So there will be continuity, and after the way the past two seasons went, it’s fair to ask whether that’s really a good thing. Some certainly will ask just that, and whether perhaps a little cross-pollination might not have been good for North Carolina basketball, after all these decades.
That probably sells Davis a little short.
It’s almost always unfair to judge an assistant by their head coach; in this case, it’s tacitly impossible. Williams was so doctrinaire, so dogmatic, that even if Davis could make a terrific case for doing things differently, it wasn’t going to happen. There was a Roy Williams way of doing things, and that’s how they were going to be done. For good reason! It worked for many, many years, until it didn’t.
The only glimpse of Davis as a head coach — the only such experience of his career — was his stint coaching UNC’s junior varsity, that wonderful anachronism, and even that is more of a learning experience for a coach than it is a tool to assess one.
So much is known about Davis as a player, both at UNC and in the NBA, and as a personage thanks to his time on television. Almost nothing is known about him as a coach. He’s spent his entire time back in Chapel Hill in the shadows, but he’s going to step into one of the brightest spotlights in the game now.
Davis deserves a chance to make this job his own, and no one at this point knows, or can know, what that’s going to look like. For all the history attached to the job, and that Davis brings with him to it, this really is a blank slate at a time of tremendous change in college basketball.
He has the job because of his attachment to North Carolina’s past, but his mandate is to define North Carolina’s future. The Tar Heels stayed within the family because it matters more there than anywhere else. It’s up to Davis to make sure that continues to be true.
