Even with Tommy Lloyd off the board, UNC can do more than just salvage its coaching search

When a blue-blood program like North Carolina fires its head coach, everyone from the administration to the fanbase immediately starts dreaming big. It began with phone calls to Brad Stevens and visions of plucking Dusty May right out of Ann Arbor, but after Arizona head coach Tommy Lloyd signed an extension to stay in Tucson on Friday, regret has begun to seep in, replacing those big dreams. 

I’m here to say that it shouldn’t. Dusty May is technically still a possible, if unlikely, option, and while none of the other names on the reconfigured candidate list from Billy Donovan to Josh Schertz would feel like a home run, that’s not the criterion for firing Hubert Davis to be the right decision. All Bubba Cunningham and the UNC brass have to do is hire a better coach than Hubert Davis, and this is a success. 

The new hire, whoever it ends up being, shouldn’t be judged against the dream of Lloyd or Stevens, because no matter how close they got, if pen wasn’t put to paper, then they were just that: dreams. Davis is the only real bar UNC has to clear, and while his tenure started with a bang, and he’ll always have a soft spot in the fanbase’s collective heart, that’s not a very high one. 

UNC’s next hire shouldn’t be compared to Tommy Lloyd, only to Hubert Davis

An interesting parallel to this situation is Penn State football. Here’s the obligatory admission that I recognize UNC basketball is on a different level as a program, and this is not a one-to-one comparison. 

Anyways, midway through this past season, Penn State fired James Franklin. He was only a year removed from a College Football Playoff semifinal appearance and produced a perennial Big Ten contender, but he kept banging his head on the ceiling, and for Penn State fans, that wasn’t good enough. 

Then, Penn State embarked on a long and winding coaching search that began with dreams of bringing Curt Cignetti back to his home state and ended when they turned to Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell after BYU’s Kalani Sitake very publicly rebuffed their affections. 

That’s what happens in a modern-day coaching search when any job, if the base is willing to pay up for its roster, is a great job. Even a UNC basketball is going to take its lumps and get other guys paid to stay put. 

You can actually make a very real argument that Franklin is a better coach than Campbell, and it was still the right move for Penn State to make. It reset the clock with an anxious fanbase and, more importantly, reinvigorated the donor base, which is a hugely overlooked aspect of any coaching change and the success of any program in the NIL era. 

So, back to UNC. Even if the Tar Heels don’t land May, Donovan, who is fairly viewed as a risk from his 11 years out of college, but does have two national championships on his resume, or another traditional big name, this coaching search is far from a disaster. 

It may seem like it, but it’s not a zero-sum game. The goal for UNC is to go into next season with a better coach than they had last year. Ben McCollum, Grant McCasland, Mark Byington, and even Schertz are all that. And the novelty of the new will be more exciting to the donor base than another year of Davis, because, unlike Franklin, he wasn’t hitting his head on the ceiling; he was threatening to lower the floor.