3 head coaching candidates UNC needs to avoid after firing Hubert Davis

It's time for North Carolina to find a new coach. Yup, Bubba Cunningham and the UNC administration are going to look far and wide for a replacement after Hubert Davis was fired. Now is the time to look at who could be the best fit, but sometimes the best place to start is by crossing off the names that you absolutely won’t consider. 

So, we’re here to do that for the North Carolina brass, and we’ve got two former Tar Heels who should not even be in the mix for an interview, and a former NBA champion who suddenly has family ties to Chapel Hill. It’s nice for a coach to have program ties, but that wasn’t enough to save Davis, and when a job like UNC is open, the program has to land one of the best coaches out there, no matter where they’re from. 

With so many great potential candidates who UNC could theoretically pry away from their Power Conference jobs, Cunningham and company must avoid wasting their time entertaining the idea of any of these two former Tar Heels and even a former NBA champion taking over in Chapel Hill. 

READ: 5 realistic head coach candidates UNC should target if the Hubert Davis era ends

3. Jerry Stackhouse, Golden State Warriors assistant coach

Jerry Stackhouse had an All-American season as a sophomore at UNC in 1994-95 and helped lead the Tar Heels to the Final Four. That qualifies him to be a program legend, but not their head coach. Stackhouse is currently an assistant for the Golden State Warriors on Steve Kerr’s staff. He’s gotten a head coaching opportunity before, and he didn’t have nearly enough success to land another, at least not one like UNC. 

Stackhouse led Vanderbilt from 2019-24, and his high-water mark over those five seasons was a 22-15 campaign in 2022-23 that still wasn’t good enough for a March Madness bid. He also had two nine-win seasons mixed in and an 11-21 campaign in Year 1. If UNC wants a coach from Vanderbilt, it should hire his replacement, Mark Byington. 

2. King Rice, Monmouth head coach

The 57-year-old former Tar Heel point guard immediately jumped into the coaching ranks after finishing his playing career under Dean Smith in 1991. He bounced around from assistant jobs at Oregon, Illinois State, Providence, and Vanderbilt, with a stint as the Bahamian national team coach mixed in before finally getting the reins of his own program in 2011 at Monmouth. 

Monmouth is where Rice has spent the last 15 years, with mixed results and zero trips to March Madness. That’s not exactly the resume of a guy who should be considered to take over his alma mater. Moving on from Davis indicates that Cunningham and the UNC administration are taking the program seriously; hiring Rice would be anything but.  

1. Mike Malone, former Denver Nuggets head coach

Why is Mike Malone on this list, you may ask? Well, the 54-year-old NBA champion has a daughter playing volleyball at UNC and has spent time around the program. While he's not on the fanbase's radar, he may be on Cunningham's. Though reports indicate that Cunningham wasn't leading the charge for Bill Belichick, with him as UNC's football coach, you can't rule anything out.

There's reason to have trepidation about any NBA coach coming to the college game, even former national champions like Billy Donovan or pie-in-the-sky candidates like Brad Stevens. The game has changed massively since they coached at the college level, and though most of those changes make it more similar to the association, it's still an unnecessary risk for a program like UNC that should, theoretically, have its pick of the top college coaches.

At least Donovan and Stevens have coached and had major success in college. Malone was last a college assistant at Manhattan in 2001. He led the Denver Nuggets to an NBA Title, and clearly has the chops, but he hasn't taken (or gotten) a job since he was fired in 2025, and would be a wildly unconventional hire.