UNC Basketball: The 15 Tar Heels opposing fans hated most

Roy Williams

North Carolina head coach Roy Williams has won three NCAA Tournament championships, and gone to nine Final Fours. His teams have won 18 regular season titles, and seven conference tournament championships. He’s a nine-time conference Coach of the Year, and two-time AP National Coach of the Year. He was inducted into the College Basketball Hall-of-Fame in 2006, and a Basketball Hall-of-Fame inductee in 2007. Williams has compiled 871 wins and counting, and he’s the only college basketball coach to ever win 400 games at two different schools.

Yet he can’t even get the respect he deserves from other professionals in his business.

Multiple times over the years, Williams’ peers have voted him as one of college basketball’s most overrated coaches. In 2012, for example, a CBS Sports poll of nearly 100 coaches revealed that 23 percent of participants believed Williams was the sports’ most overrated coach. 17 percent voted for then-Texas head coach Rick Barnes, and another 11 percent picked Baylor’s Scott Drew.

Now, I don’t need to discuss the vast difference between Williams and the aforementioned coaches, and that’s meant to disparage neither Barnes nor Drew. There simply no comparison, though, other than the fact that they’re all Division I head coaches. But that’s about where the similarities end.

Let’s start with when the poll took place back in 2012. Williams had already won two national championships, and was fresh off consecutive Elite 8 appearances — the second of which was likely cut short thanks to an untimely injury to the Tar Heels’ Cousy Award-winning point guard Kendall Marshall.

What more did Williams need to prove at that point in his career to not be overrated? And he’d certainly done enough to at least not be the most overrated coach in the nation, right?

Is it jealousy that Williams didn’t begin his head coaching career like most do by starting with a smaller program and building their way up? The Dean Smith prodigy was fortunate enough to get his first head coaching gig at the University of Kansas, a school that was on probation, but still fresh off an NCAA Tournament title in 1988.

Then, after 400-plus wins and a handful of Final Four appearances, Williams moved on to an even better job at arguably the most prestigious program in college basketball history. He was finally back home, at the place where he was mentored by one of the true icons of the sport.

Aside from that, Kansas Jayhawks fans were fairly bitter toward Williams for a number of years after he left Lawrence to return home as head coach of the Tar Heels. Those feelings seem to have died down, though, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Bill Self has had success with the Jayhawks, leading the program to its first national title in 20 years in 2008. The second is that time appears to have healed the wounds caused by Williams’ departure from the Jayhawks back in 2003.

Fellow coaches and pundits have finally started giving Williams the credit he is due in recent years, too, acknowledging the success that he’s had and the legacy he’s built in the game of college basketball. His achievements over the past 30 years as a head coach are rivaled by few, and in the eyes of some, have even surpassed that of his legendary mentor.