Hubert Davis enters the 2025-2026 season inspiring mixed feelings in Tar Heel fans. Iron 5. Bench usage. NIL. Two iconic wins over Duke and Coach K. Two seasons on the margins of NCAA basketball relevance.
The list goes on. The Davis Era of UNC basketball includes both the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. We sat down to talk about how we view the program’s body of work under Davis, what we need to see from the program this upcoming season, and what might push some of us over the edge.
We’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below.
What’s your impression of Davis’ body of work so far?
Brandon G: Frustrating. I am not sure there is a better way to describe it. Whether it’s failing short of expectations or flunking out of the transfer portal, the best way to describe UNC during Hubert’s tenure is frustrating.
Matt B: I’ve been pretty disappointed, honestly. I really hoped he’d be able to carry over the momentum from the national title game run in 2022. Obviously, that didn’t happen; in two of the three subsequent seasons, his team has fallen massively short of preseason expectations (the Tar Heels did outperform their preseason #19 ranking in 2023-24, but they lost to inferior teams in the ACC title game and the Sweet 16, so I still count that season as a bust). I was sure last year would be the end of the road for him before the selection committee threw Carolina a highly questionable tournament bid.
Akil: As a whole, I’m fairly underwhelmed. The results are what they are, and they paint a picture maybe not of a bad coach but certainly not a consistently good one. Though the occupation is one where you have to prioritize process over results, it’s still a results business, so the fact that his tenure has produced 2 of the 5 worst UNC basketball seasons (3 if we just talk regular seasons) of my lifetime is not nothing. And the processes haven’t been all that inspiring, either. I’m particularly perturbed by the fact that he seems to refuse to learn from his missteps. His bench usage, his personality management, and his weirdly insular definition of the Carolina Basketball family have all been detrimental to his program through multiple years, and yet he hangs on to them. He seems to believe that his teams will win if they just commit harder to what he wants, rather than adapting those wants based on how his teams have fallen short. That’s not a recipe for success anywhere.
Thomas: In his four years at the helm, Davis’s Heels have finished 2nd, 7th, 1st and 4th in a watered down ACC. He has a total of three NCAA tournament appearances, including two Sweet 16’s and of course finished just short of winning a title in his first season. All in all, that’s pretty solid results for your first four years as a head coach but also short of most UNC fan’s expectations. I do wonder if the perceptions would be different if the worst year had been his first one, with three straight trips to the tourney and two Sweet 16s in three years coming into this season.
Expectations are a part of being the head of the UNC basketball program, but it’s not just the fans; the national media also generally expects the Heels to be good year in and out regardless who’s the coach. Random trivia: UNC’s ranking of 25 in the year’s preseason AP poll is its lowest since 2003. While I doubt most fans care about the preseason poll more than the actual results, it’s a sign of how the program’s results haven’t lived up to its own – or the sports – lofty expectations.
Brandon A: Evaluating Hubert Davis’ tenure so far is a really tough task that I don’t know that any of us are fully equipped to do. He took over as the head coach right when the transfer portal/NIL era really took off, which means he’s had to deal with the headache of adapting to an evolving college landscape. During that time, he made it to the national championship game, missed the tournament the following year, made it to the Sweet Sixteen, and then barely made it to the tournament, only to lose in the round of 64.
I would say that I think Davis is a good coach that needs a very specific roster in order to succeed. That specific roster needs some dawgs on his team — Brady Manek, Harrison Ingram, and Cormac Ryan all gave him that, and in the seasons that he didn’t have those guys things went pretty badly. Roy Williams always knew how to coach through not having that guy, but I would argue even he wasn’t able to win national titles without that guy. The difference between the two coaches, though, is that without that guy the floor is a lot lower for Davis. I do believe he knows how to coach, and I do think that adding a GM should help him quite a bit. But unfortunately a good coach for UNC and being a good coach in general are two different things. I would say that I am still evaluating whether or not he is the guy for Carolina.
David: Opposing perspective: I can’t figure out how much of this has been poor coaching and how much has been unconscionably inept support from UNC. If Ohio State sent out its football coach with half the NIL of its main rival and national competition, saying, “We’re the Buckeyes, sell that,” OSU fans would riot until the funding was up to snuff.
Imagine UNC football outspending Alabama football by a good margin. I can’t. Yet Alabama’s basketball program far outspent UNC’s the last three seasons. Oats landed some of the recruits and transfers Davis would have preferred but lacked the funds to close. How did we ever end up in a reality where Alabama basketball (and Auburn, and Tennessee, and…) outspends UNC basketball? That lack of funding showed up most in depth and the transfer portal (which overlaps the issue of bench usage). We had $10 million to throw at Belichick but only $4 million for our basketball roster last season? I’m still mad as hell over it.
To me, on a level playing field, Davis is the coach who spanked Coach K in his final home game, again in the Final Four, and would have won a title absent a bad floor board.
What do you need to see from Davis this season?
Akil: He’s completely rebuilt this roster with by all accounts a budget at least matching the big-time players in the sport. The one player with any claim to seniority on it appears to actually be stepping up as a leader. I think this is a roster with which Davis can sleepwalk and finish with a fringe top-25, 6-ish seed team. That would probably be enough to save his job, but to actually move my opinion, he’ll have to show that he can elevate them. If he does, his team should threaten to win the ACC regular season (beating Duke at least once is a must in this endeavor), earn a 4 seed or better, and then get to the second weekend. My preseason prediction that he’ll do that or better reflects some level of grace on my part, in addition to the unreasonable optimism of fandom.
Brandon G: Not making the same mistakes that have made the past seasons so frustrating. Whether that be not continuing to start guys who shouldn’t be playing big minutes (Caleb Love in 2022-23, Eliot Cadeau last season), trusting his bench more (the Iron five has to end), running out small ball lineups that continually do not work, and getting into huge deficits only to crawl out and fall short. Signs that he can evolve and grow and take the team where it needs to go.
Brandon A: The big thing that I want to see from Hubert Davis this season is proper roster management and the ability to excel in close game situations. There were times last season where he had a little too much faith in Elliot Cadeau and RJ Davis, which is something that we saw with a few other guys during his tenure as well. He needs to know when to pull the plug, know what players play well together, and most importantly, which players don’t. That is the first thing for me.
Going back to close game situations, this roster will be the ultimate test for him because right now I do not know who gets the ball in crunch time. Is it Luka Bogavac? Do you feed Caleb Wilson? Is Kyan Evans a good enough shooter to let him jack up threes? It’s a test that none of us honestly have the answers to, but it is still a test that Davis has to pass. If he is able to show me some good things in these two departments, I think I will be pretty happy.
David: I want to see this roster play UNC basketball. Selfless. Lots of ball movement. Feet constantly moving on defense. Key bench contributions. Run every chance we get. Just keep coming. Go far in March. This feels like the first complete roster Davis gets to work with, including a deep bench. I’m as excited heading into a season as I’ve been in a long time.
Thomas: I need to see this team click. This will be the first team with zero Roy Williams players — everyone on this squad will be someone Davis recruited and has a role in mind for. Too often during Davis’s term, it seems like the individual pieces were good but didn’t mesh into a cohesive team.
Davis had the misfortune of becoming a head coach at an old school blue-blood right when everything about college athletics has changed. Gone are building teams for two, three and four years out. A successful head coach needs to be able recruit and form a new team nearly yearly; the 2025-26 team is a good example of this, as Trimble is our only major remaining player from last year’s squad. I want to see Davis accomplish this to better degree than he has so far.
Matt B: Results. Carolina is starting the season as a top 25 team and was picked as the third-best team in the ACC. With the talent on this year’s roster, there’s no reason the Tar Heels shouldn’t be able to live up to those rankings.
What’s your breaking point?
Brandon A: If Hubert Davis fails to make it to the NCAA Tournament with this team, I’m done. This roster has a higher floor than last year’s team on paper, and there’s no reason why they should barely make it to the tournament, let alone miss it. I also feel like the Heels need to be top three in the ACC, if not top two. If it comes down to Duke and Carolina in the league, then it is called business as usual. Louisville edging them out would be forgivable, but there’s really no other scenario that is acceptable. So, if they miss the NCAA Tournament, I’m ready to move on from him. If they are fifth in the ACC, I’m probably also packing his bags because that would probably mean that they had to sweat making it to the tournament as well.
Akil: Well, there’s the obvious, which is a season like last year: in results only, with a team at the fringes of NCAAT qualification, and/or in appearance, with the coach having little apparent handle on his personnel or personalities. With the depth we’ve already seen on this roster, I’d also feel pretty ready to move on if we saw him start trying to Iron Five entire halves of basketball again. And, as more of a basketball nerd thing: this staff hasn’t really tried to mess with the shooting mechanics of established shooters (Brady Manek is the foremost example), so I’m not too worried about the shooting of players like Bogavac, Evans, and Powell, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Derek Dixon’s shooting numbers as the season goes on. I think Davis, in line with his predecessor, has a pretty outdated conception of what a jump shot should look like, so if we see certain changes from what Dixon looked like as a prospect, it’ll be one more thing that shows that Davis isn’t really willing to learn on the job.
David: Oof. I can’t really put into words how badly I want to this work, for UNC, for Davis, and for my admittedly romantic notions of UNC basketball. Reaching a breaking point on Davis would probably break me as well. It’s entirely possible I’ve read the context all wrong and Davis is everything his detractors say he is. If this bench doesn’t contribute significantly, I was wrong. If these pieces look disconnected on offense and defense in key moments, I was wrong. If we’re a bubble team, I was wrong. And Davis is probably gone.
Brandon G: Continuing to do all the things that have made him frustrating over the past seasons. He no longer really has any excuses and either needs to show that growth needed from a coach or move back to commentating for ESPN.
Matt B: Failing to live up to preseason expectations–again. Like I said earlier, this team is talented enough to contend for an ACC title and make it past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. I understand that teams fall short for all kinds of reasons and that nobody should expect theirs to hit their ceiling every single year, but when a pattern of underachievement develops, it’s time to make a change.
Thomas: I’m not sure I have a breaking point per se, but ideally UNC will either be really good or really bad this year. A 10-21 year will make it easy to move on; likewise, if we finish 25-6 and make the Final Four I assume most fans will be pretty content, and Davis’s job becomes much more secure.
The real question is what happens after a middling season where we’re kind of good and end up say, 5th in the ACC and a seven seed in the NCAA tournament, losing to a good 2 seed. It’ll be an improvement over last year, but still short of where the Heels traditionally have been. If this happens, we’re in sort of basketball purgatory (in fairness, a purgatory that 90% of college basketball fans would love). Even if you want to move on, who do you bring in? There aren’t a lot of branches on the UNC coaching tree that I’d back bringing in, and I think parts of the university leadership would rebel at the idea of an “outsider” coaching the basketball team.
Hopefully we avoid all this, and Davis proves all the doubters wrong this year. No one loves the UNC more than Hubert Davis. I really want him to succeed, both as a UNC fan and a fan of who Davis is as a person.
