Latest reports indicate UNC has its coaching wishlist in the wrong order

We’ve not yet reached 24 hours since Hubert Davis was fired as the head coach of North Carolina basketball. Yet it’s already become increasingly clear who is at the top of UNC’s wishlist as his replacement. The names include some of the top young coaches in the sport: Michigan’s Dusty May, Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, and Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger. 

However, multiple reporters have landed on two-time national champion Billy Donovan as the top candidate in Chapel Hill. There is speculation that the current head coach of the Bulls, who hasn’t coached in the college game in 11 years, would be interested in a return and may be stepping down from his post in Chicago. 

Jeff Goodman of Field of 68 is the latest to stick Donovan at the top of UNC’s list. While the 60-year-old is worth consideration for any blue-blood program with a vacancy, if he is taking priority over active coaches like May, that’s a huge mistake. 

Billy Donovan is too big a risk to be at the top of UNC’s wishlist

Donovan has proven to be a winning basketball coach at the collegiate and professional levels. There aren’t many coaches who can make the same claim, and there aren’t any others who have multiple national championship rings. 

Still, college basketball has changed just a little bit since Donovan was winning back-to-back titles with Florida in 2007 and 2008 and even since his last Final Four trip in 2015. Many of those changes have brought college basketball closer to the professional game, but managing a roster in the NIL, revenue-sharing, and Transfer Portal era is an even more fickle task than navigating the transactional world of the NBA. At least in the pros, they have contracts to keep players around. 

Donovan hasn’t proven himself in this era. Maybe he’ll take to it with ease, but many of the coaches who were dominating the college landscape with him a decade or so ago, Jay Wright, Mike Krzyzewski, Tony Bennett, and Roy Williams, all decided to call it a career once the NIL era kicked into high gear. Plenty of others failed to make the transition and had their administration decide they were done for them. 

May, on the other hand, took Florida Atlantic to a Final Four, and in just two years at Michigan, he has a Big Ten Tournament and a regular-season title, and currently has his Wolverines in the Sweet 16 as the top seed in the Midwest region. He’s on the cutting edge of college basketball’s latest trend with supersized front courts to dominate the rim and limit three-point variance, and clearly has a handle on the sport’s new machinations. 

The only problem with May is that there’s not much reason for him to leave Michigan. UNC is a better job for its history, brand recognition, and built-in recruiting prowess, but only marginally, and now that he has Michigan humming, there’s no reason to uproot that. 

Lloyd and Otzelberger, who are both also leading national championship contenders into the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, may feel the same way and rebuff UNC’s affections, leaving the Heels to circle back to Donovan. But those are all three calls Bubba Cunningham should make before Donovan. Florida’s Todd Golden and Alabama’s Nate Oats, though they aren’t getting serious consideration in this search, should be above Donovan on that list as well.