UNC will hire Hubert Davis as its next head coach for Men’s Basketball

Per several UNC media sources, Bubba Cunningham and all the other decision-making forces at play have decided to hire Hubert Davis as the next head coach of UNC Men’s Basketball. Davis, who played at Chapel Hill from 1988-1992 and followed that with a 14-year NBA career, had been Roy Williams’ assistant since 2012.

Williams’ retirement on the 1st of April necessitated a quick turnaround, and Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said as much in his press conference that afternoon. Davis will have a head start on steering the team through a spring that will be like none before it, thanks to the combination of frozen eligibility and no-penalty transfers that the NCAA has allowed thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Davis’s only coaching experience is as an assistant with UNC, which means this hire will undoubtedly draw a lot of scrutiny for not drawing a more established candidate to, as Cunningham put it, the best college basketball job in the country. There are a lot of unknowns here, some of which will be unraveled in the coming weeks and some of which we might not see answered until the next season is well underway. What is known is that Davis completely understands the magnitude of the UNC family and brand and how they are intertwined, which can’t be discounted when thinking about this job: The family aspect of it isn’t about elitism, nepotism, or being exclusionary, rather it’s how UNC, both as a basketball program and as a university, has chosen to sell itself as different from its peers.

The 50-year old Davis will also make history as the first Black non-interim head coach of a revenue sport at UNC. Not a ton about the hiring process has been made public so far, but we do know that Wes Miller, the head coach at UNCG, was also in consideration and probably interviewed. There was also interested in some more aspirational names, such as Mark Few, who’s coaching for a championship tonight, and Jay Wright, who turned down the Philadelphia 76ers just last year. We’ll continue to cover this hire, including our thoughts on it, as more information on it unfolds over the next month or so.