Hubert Davis Catch-all

[rodoheel]

Kansas over the last 4 seasons:
2022- beat us in the national championship game
2023- 24-8 2nd round NCAAT
2024 - 23-11 2nd round NCAAT
2025 - 21-13 1st round NCAAT

kintuckie over last 4 years:

2022 26-8 1st round NCAAT
22-12 2nd round NCAAT
23-10 1st round NCAAT
24-12 sweet 16

Has kintuckee been more successful ?
Has Kansas been down the last couple of years but" nowhere close" to us ?

It doesn't look like it in terms of record and performance in the NCAAT.

You are skewing this inquiry by focusing on NCAAT performance, which is inherently fluky from season to season in a single elimination tournament, and overall record, which is affected by strength of schedule (both KU and UK have been playing in much tougher conferences, as the ACC has been down and often terrible over the last five years). You are ignoring more comprehensive measurements of how good the teams have been over those time periods - in particular, I think that the simplest way to get a fairly holistic understanding of how a team's season went is too look at its NCAAT seed for the year. You could also incorporate efficiency metrics, which are certainly much better than just looking a a team's record to compare it to others. I have no problem also including NCAAT performance because fan bases care about it, but I think that overall performance is a much better indicator how good a shape a program is in - and a much better predictor of how well it's likely to perform moving forward - than NCAAT performance alone.

Both those schools are having relative down periods compared to their standard of success. But neither has missed the NCAAT since Hubert has been here, and neither has been on the bubble since Hubert has been here. In that same time period, those programs have earned a top 4 NCAAT seed 7 combined times in 5 years (3.5 average), and we have done it once.

Neither of those fan bases is thrilled with how things are going right now. Pope is probably on the hot seat about as much as Hubert is at this point; Self probably can't ever really be on the hot seat given his track record but the natives are restless But trying to act like everything is totally fine at UNC because of what UK and KU have been doing is just pure copium. We are slipping badly from our historical standard. Either we try to reverse that, or we accept a lower level of success. If you are happy with a lower level of success, that's your choice, but don't try to kid yourself into thinking that's not what you're doing.

 

[finesse]

Hubert has been there 5. Roy's last 2 years weren't good, either. So really it's 7. As it has been pointed out based on their record and seedings in the tournament, the results have been inconsistent.

So what you're saying is that the inconsistency started with Roy and that, while Hubert has stopped the decline, you are disappointed that it hasn't been a steady rise to excellence? Is this essentially correct?

 

[superrific]

I actually fundamentally agree with this premise. the question "would UNC be better off with a different coach?" is fundamentally impossible to answer. No one knows how much better or worse UNC will be with another coach, and we will never know that. So if you are waiting for a certain clear answer to address that question, you could be waiting forever, because short of HD suddenly going 8-20 you are never going to approach certainty. That approach is what would lead you to hang on to a mediocre coach for too long. Asking those who want to replace Hubert to "prove" that another coach would be better is stacking the deck against the people with that opinion, and fundamentally structuring the debate so that there's always a finger on the scale in favor of keeping Hubert.

Instead, the questions should be "What is the standard that UNC is aiming for in college basketball?" and "Are we confident the current coach is meeting, and can meet, that standard?" The standard doesn't have to be, and may not be, the standard that Dean or Roy set. But framing the discussion that way at least allows for dialogue about what the standard actually is - what our goals as a program are. Whereas if you frame the question "would UNC be better off with a different coach" you are bypassing the setting of any institutional standard in the first place, which I don't think is the right way to run any sort of enterprise.

Required certainty is not the same thing as answering a question. We still need to be asking "would we be better with a different coach, and which one." That we might have only 60% confidence in our answer is a different issue entirely. That's about risk tolerance, or perhaps uncertainty tolerance depending on your preferred terminology.

"What is the standard UNC is aiming for in college basketball" is more or less the same question. If HD is falling short of that standard, then we are implicitly saying we'd do better with a better coach. I mean, we have to be. The alternative is the NCSU trap, consistently holding coaches to an unrealistic standard they won't meet. If our standard is realistic, then your framing and mine amount to the same thing. If the standard is unrealistic, then my framing is better because it prevents us from being Captain Ahab.

I don't understand what you mean by "goals of the program." The goals are quite simple. First, win. As much as possible. Maybe there are other goals like family or ethics or whatever, but they are secondary and this discussion concerns wins. I don't know what "goals" adds, other than an opportunity to argue ove new terms.

Let's put it this way. Suppose after 2009, we got an extraordinary offer. God wanted to send his second son to coach UNC basketball, and he would be invested with divine power. It's maybe not as implausible as we think; after all, God does like Carolina, which accounts for the color of the sky. But anyway, Roy was meeting the goals of the program, but we definitely should have fired him in preference for God-Coach. God-Coach wouldn't have missed the NCAA the next year, presumably.

Silly hypos aside, if we can get a better coach, then we should.

 

[superrific]

Maybe it's just arguing over semantics. But the results have not been good enough for Carolina based on the history of the program and compared to other programs the past 5 years.

I'm just asking you to use words in a non-silly way. What you are arguing is the same thing you've been arguing: the results have not been good enough. Full stop. It's not a wild position. Probably a majority of posters (based on my very rough eyeballing) agree with you. And that's really all there is to say.

 

[Peppers49]

UCLA is absolutely no longer an elite program. They are a former blue blood and we should be worried about having the same decline they did. They are a cautionary tale for us to avoid.

Kentucky, like us, is going through a rough patch and their coach is on the hot seat as a result. But even then they have been more consistently successful than us the last few years (2, 6, 3, 3, 7 seeds the last five years) despite a lack of postseason success - and they basically pushed out a HOF coach because they stopped being a contender. If Pope doesn't have them back in the top 10 next year he will probably be fired.

Kansas has been a little down the last couple years but nowhere close to as much as UNC, and of course they won the national title in 2022 and got a 1 seed again the following year before disappointing in the tourney. The 7 seed Self got last year is the only time in his entire coaching tenure he got lower than a 4 seed. They are definitely still a blue blood and while others have been better the last 5 years (especially in the B12, where the addition of Arizona and Houston along with the rise of ISU has challenged their hegemony) most would probably still consider them an elite program.

UNC's last 7 years have been missed tournament, 8 seed, 8 seed, missed tournament, 1 seed, 11 seed, 6 seed. If anyone thinks we will still be considered an elite program if the next 7 years look similar, you're crazy. We are in more danger than people realize of continuing to lose our national prestige at a precipitous rate. You can already see that our own fan base is starting to rationalize this level of performance, and before long we will be perfectly happy to just make the NCAAT most years.

I think what you’re outlining is harder to come to terms with for fans that have followed the program for decades. The program has been the cream of the crop nationally for the vast majority of our fandom, so that last run of consistent excellence in the late 2010s doesn’t feel that long ago. We’ve seen the program dip several times and then come back around, and a lot of us still probably think that Carolina basketball is essentially too big to fail in the back of our minds.

The current generation of players/students/young fans for the most part are too young to remember any of that. The timeline you laid out for the last 5-7 years is basically the only memory they have of Carolina basketball, so their standards naturally aren’t going to be the same. It’s a slippery slope.

 

[heelinhell]

You are skewing this inquiry by focusing on NCAAT performance, which is inherently fluky from season to season in a single elimination tournament, and overall record, which is affected by strength of schedule (both KU and UK have been playing in much tougher conferences, as the ACC has been down and often terrible over the last five years). You are ignoring more comprehensive measurements of how good the teams have been over those time periods - in particular, I think that the simplest way to get a fairly holistic understanding of how a team's season went is too look at its NCAAT seed for the year. You could also incorporate efficiency metrics, which are certainly much better than just looking a a team's record to compare it to others. I have no problem also including NCAAT performance because fan bases care about it, but I think that overall performance is a much better indicator how good a shape a program is in - and a much better predictor of how well it's likely to perform moving forward - than NCAAT performance alone.

Both those schools are having relative down periods compared to their standard of success. But neither has missed the NCAAT since Hubert has been here, and neither has been on the bubble since Hubert has been here. In that same time period, those programs have earned a top 4 NCAAT seed 7 combined times in 5 years (3.5 average), and we have done it once.

Neither of those fan bases is thrilled with how things are going right now. Pope is probably on the hot seat about as much as Hubert is at this point; Self probably can't ever really be on the hot seat given his track record but the natives are restless But trying to act like everything is totally fine at UNC because of what UK and KU have been doing is just pure copium. We are slipping badly from our historical standard. Either we try to reverse that, or we accept a lower level of success. If you are happy with a lower level of success, that's your choice, but don't try to kid yourself into thinking that's not what you're doing.

I appreciate your condescending advice not to kid myself, but if how you are seeded in the NCAAT is the gold standard for success, then I will continue to kid myself and rely on season records and performance in the NCAAT as my gold standard for a successful season.

 

[finesse]

UCLA's blueblood status was an artifact of Sam Gilbert enabling one of the first nationwide recruiting programs in the country. Not to detract from Wooden's coaching abilities, he'd have been great anyway, but California climate and program perks got him a whole lot to work with.

 

[Bigs23]

Those who want Hubert fired overlap greatly with those who wanted Roy gone too.

They got what they wished for once...

 

[thebruinbleedstarheelblue]

No, my thesis is firing Hubie after the success he has had runs the risk of going down the Indiana because they couldn't find a coach that could live up to Bobby Knight status.

Your thesis is Indiana made 8 wrong coaching choices following the retirement of a legend which sounds similar to the thesis presented year in and year out by our football fans that the reason for our mediocre success has been that we made the wrong coaching choices.

and I'm not saying we that we can't replace Hubie with the next Dean or Roy, but there is a risk we may not and that there is further risk that it could continue coach after coach after coach...

Success?

 

[mpaer]

How bout we go get a football coach that is not MPAERS age
Put 25 mill in Tanners hand for the portal and Euro players and give Hubert another year

 

[thebruinbleedstarheelblue]

Those who want Hubert fired overlap greatly with those who wanted Roy gone too.

They got what they wished for once...

Roy is old man... he retired.

Have you seen him in the stands? My dad has vertigo do you know what that's like on an older man?

He was a soldier to be out there

 

[rodoheel]

I appreciate your condescending advice not to kid myself, but if how you are seeded in the NCAAT is the gold standard for success, then I will continue to kid myself and rely on season records and performance in the NCAAT as my gold standard for a successful season.

OK. Looking at records with no regard to how bad the ACC might have been in a given season seems pretty silly to me, but you do you. I guess if we continue to get NCAA seeds between 6-8 you'll think everything is fine as long as our record is 25-8 or something.

 

[superrific]

OK. Looking at records with no regard to how bad the ACC might have been in a given season seems pretty silly to me, but you do you. I guess if we continue to get NCAA seeds between 6-8 you'll think everything is fine as long as our record is 25-8 or something.

Do you think you're straw-manning this poster? I haven't read all of his posts or yours, but I've not known him to be a silly person (even when day drinking) so my guess is that he would in fact have at least some regard to the ACC being good or bad.

 

[NYCBlueBlood]

Those who want Hubert fired overlap greatly with those who wanted Roy gone too.

They got what they wished for once...

Yeah, I realize it's not a 1 to 1 sort of thing... but from my perspective this is the exact same convo I was having 6-7 years ago when the angry hoards wanted Roy to retire and move on... and if he refused, for the admin to push him out. I said back then, be careful what you wish for. You push out a HoF coach, you never know what you'll get to replace him. But they assured me that the then current state of things was not up to the standards of UNC... and that I was ok with mediocrity if i did not agree with them. And WE ARE UNC, we will get the best available. And here we sit...

 

[rodoheel]

Required certainty is not the same thing as answering a question. We still need to be asking "would we be better with a different coach, and which one." That we might have only 60% confidence in our answer is a different issue entirely. That's about risk tolerance, or perhaps uncertainty tolerance depending on your preferred terminology.

"What is the standard UNC is aiming for in college basketball" is more or less the same question. If HD is falling short of that standard, then we are implicitly saying we'd do better with a better coach. I mean, we have to be. The alternative is the NCSU trap, consistently holding coaches to an unrealistic standard they won't meet. If our standard is realistic, then your framing and mine amount to the same thing. If the standard is unrealistic, then my framing is better because it prevents us from being Captain Ahab.

I don't understand what you mean by "goals of the program." The goals are quite simple. First, win. As much as possible. Maybe there are other goals like family or ethics or whatever, but they are secondary and this discussion concerns wins. I don't know what "goals" adds, other than an opportunity to argue ove new terms.

Let's put it this way. Suppose after 2009, we got an extraordinary offer. God wanted to send his second son to coach UNC basketball, and he would be invested with divine power. It's maybe not as implausible as we think; after all, God does like Carolina, which accounts for the color of the sky. But anyway, Roy was meeting the goals of the program, but we definitely should have fired him in preference for God-Coach. God-Coach wouldn't have missed the NCAA the next year, presumably.

Silly hypos aside, if we can get a better coach, then we should.

The problem is you are suggesting a decision-making process that focuses as much or more on things external to the program as internal. Your last hypothetical should illustrate to you why this line of thinking is never going to be used by anyone. In reality, not a single program in history would ever consider replacing 2009 Roy Williams. Nor would it even be evaluating what options are available. That's not how any organization, ever, works. If you have a 98th percentile coach you aren't saying "look, this is great, but we need to keep our eyes open in case a 99th percentile coach comes along." No, you're just going to keep the 98th percentile coach as long as he is producing results that you're happy with.

And on the flip side, for an underperforming coach, you are suggesting that when a coach is not meeting your standard your decision whether to fire him should be based as much on who is "available" as on how your coach is performing. But the problem is, you're never really going to know who is "available" until you have a job opening. You can't just go around constantly backchanneling every other potential coach to gauge their interest, because it will ultimately get out that you're looking and undermine your current coach. And even if you did that, you can't entirely trust that a coach who responds positively to backchanneling will actually come if you fire your coach.

We can't just sit around waiting for our "confidence interval" in the next coach being more successful to edge above a certain point. If your current guy isn't the guy, every year you wait for the exact right replacement to be available is another wasted year. You simply have to get comfortably with more uncertainty than you're suggesting about how good the next guy will be, because it will be impossible to know who the real candidates to be the "next guy" are, and how realistic they are, until you actually have a job opening to interview for.

 

[rodoheel]

Do you think you're straw-manning this poster? I haven't read all of his posts or yours, but I've not known him to be a silly person (even when day drinking) so my guess is that he would in fact have at least some regard to the ACC being good or bad.

The poster just said that in evaluating how well we're doing, he will "rely on season records and performance in the NCAAT as [his] gold standard for a successful season." Relying on those things very clearly excludes any consideration of how strong the conference is, just like he ignored conference strength (and SOS more broadly) when using only overall records and NCAAT results to argue that we've been just as good as UK and KU since Hubert has been here (despite the fact that they have clearly been playing much stronger competition during that time). I've been saying that UNC's intentional overscheduling of creampuffs this year to artificially inflate our record this year is silly, but clearly there are some people who are perfectly happy to ignore other issues as long as our record looks OK, so I guess it was a good strategy from Bubba.

Personally I think that poster has done a good job constructing for himself a reality where he doesn't have to confront how far UNC has been slipping nationally, as evidenced by the trend in our NCAAT seeds, among other things. I completely understand why people would rather tell themselves a comforting story than confront reality. but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to do it.

 

[superrific]

The problem is you are suggesting a decision-making process that focuses as much or more on things external to the program as internal. Your last hypothetical should illustrate to you why this line of thinking is never going to be used by anyone. In reality, not a single program in history would ever consider replacing 2009 Roy Williams. Nor would it even be evaluating what options are available. That's not how any organization, ever, works. If you have a 98th percentile coach you aren't saying "look, this is great, but we need to keep our eyes open in case a 99th percentile coach comes along." No, you're just going to keep the 98th percentile coach as long as he is producing results that you're happy with.

And on the flip side, for an underperforming coach, you are suggesting that when a coach is not meeting your standard your decision whether to fire him should be based as much on who is "available" as on how your coach is performing. But the problem is, you're never really going to know who is "available" until you have a job opening. You can't just go around constantly backchanneling every other potential coach to gauge their interest, because it will ultimately get out that you're looking and undermine your current coach. And even if you did that, you can't entirely trust that a coach who responds positively to backchanneling will actually come if you fire your coach.

We can't just sit around waiting for our "confidence interval" in the next coach being more successful to edge above a certain point. If your current guy isn't the guy, every year you wait for the exact right replacement to be available is another wasted year. You simply have to get comfortably with more uncertainty than you're suggesting about how good the next guy will be, because it will be impossible to know who the real candidates to be the "next guy" are, and how realistic they are, until you actually have a job opening to interview for.

1. For the Roy hypothetical, that's why I had to go to the silly example of divine intervention. The point was to illustrate the principle that there's never really anything like "good enough." Unless you are winning every year, you can always do better.

2. The reason why an organization would never considering firing the 98th percentile coach is that number, 98th percentile. In other words, the chances of the replacement being better, if chosen at random, would be 1%. In a targeted search, you'd expect to do better but you'd be looking at a 10% chance of improvement. That's not enough to make it a good idea.

My point was simply that we should always be following my decision process. Sometimes doing so is super-easy. When you factor in transition costs, the value proposition for replacing a high performing coach is very poor.

3. You should always be looking at who is available. I mean, not necessarily specific coaches. But if a program assesses that it won't be able to attract a 90th percentile coach or better, it needs to take that into account when making its decisions. Not saying UNC is there; I'm just illustrating a point.

So we don't need to predict that May will leave U of M when deciding about Hubert. But if you assess that May won't come here, and neither will the other top 10 coaches, then that needs to be accounted for. Otherwise you just keep firing coaches and running in place.

 

[superrific]

The poster just said that in evaluating how well we're doing, he will "rely on season records and performance in the NCAAT as [his] gold standard for a successful season." Relying on those things very clearly excludes any consideration of how strong the conference is, just like he ignored conference strength (and SOS more broadly) when using only overall records and NCAAT results to argue that we've been just as good as UK and KU since Hubert has been here (despite the fact that they have clearly been playing much stronger competition during that time). I've been saying that UNC's intentional overscheduling of creampuffs this year to artificially inflate our record this year is silly, but clearly there are some people who are perfectly happy to ignore other issues as long as our record looks OK, so I guess it was a good strategy from Bubba.

Personally I think that poster has done a good job constructing for himself a reality where he doesn't have to confront how far UNC has been slipping nationally, as evidenced by the trend in our NCAAT seeds, among other things. I completely understand why people would rather tell themselves a comforting story than confront reality. but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to do it.

1. Gold standard doesn't mean consider nothing else.

2. NCAAT results are not conference strength dependent. I agree with your point that NCAA tournament results are not predictive (which is why I thought our 22 team should not have been ranked 1 overall), but that's a slightly different point than "ignoring conference strength."

3. We overscheduled cream puffs? I thought we played a bunch of good opponents. Isn't the problem more that KU and UK were underwhelming in quality?

4. I am somewhat skeptical of conference strength and here's why: unlike twenty years ago, there is almost no meaningful interconference play after December. That type of Duke Michigan game in February used to be common and is now extremely rare.

That's why the "strongest" conference almost invariably underperforms in the tourney. It was the strongest conference back in December. Things can change, but the statistical models don't know that. And sometimes it takes a while for teams to click. In 97, we started out badly and there were concerns whether we would make the tourney. We were at one point 3-5 in conference and I think we had no good wins. Then Ed Cota started to get it and we won 16 straight.

That happens, but when all the games are intraconference it doesn't affect the overall conference quality.

 

[rodoheel]

1. For the Roy hypothetical, that's why I had to go to the silly example of divine intervention. The point was to illustrate the principle that there's never really anything like "good enough." Unless you are winning every year, you can always do better.

2. The reason why an organization would never considering firing the 98th percentile coach is that number, 98th percentile. In other words, the chances of the replacement being better, if chosen at random, would be 1%. In a targeted search, you'd expect to do better but you'd be looking at a 10% chance of improvement. That's not enough to make it a good idea.

My point was simply that we should always be following my decision process. Sometimes doing so is super-easy. When you factor in transition costs, the value proposition for replacing a high performing coach is very poor.

3. You should always be looking at who is available. I mean, not necessarily specific coaches. But if a program assesses that it won't be able to attract a 90th percentile coach or better, it needs to take that into account when making its decisions. Not saying UNC is there; I'm just illustrating a point.

So we don't need to predict that May will leave U of M when deciding about Hubert. But if you assess that May won't come here, and neither will the other top 10 coaches, then that needs to be accounted for. Otherwise you just keep firing coaches and running in place.

You're still ignoring the fundamental problem that a school can't know who's interested and who the right choice is until it has a job opening. You are assuming much better information than ADs have, in reality, both about who is available and how good a fit that person is for the organization. The whole point of going through a job search is to do a deep and thorough evaluation of the options. You just can't do that when you don't have a job opening.

In your first post on this theory you said "The burden on the replacers is to not to show that we've been lousy. It's to show that we could do better." That just fundamentally does not make sense. We don't know who is available! We don't know who will come! We don't know how good a fit they are for UNC! That's what the coaching search and interview process is for. When firing a coach, you almost always have to make the decision with less knowledge than you seem to be assuming about who will be next. That's reality.

 

[NYCBlueBlood]

1. Gold standard doesn't mean consider nothing else.

2. NCAAT results are not conference strength dependent. I agree with your point that NCAA tournament results are not predictive (which is why I thought our 22 team should not have been ranked 1 overall), but that's a slightly different point than "ignoring conference strength."

3. We overscheduled cream puffs? I thought we played a bunch of good opponents. Isn't the problem more that KU and UK were underwhelming in quality?

4. I am somewhat skeptical of conference strength and here's why: unlike twenty years ago, there is almost no meaningful interconference play after December. That type of Duke Michigan game in February used to be common and is now extremely rare.

That's why the "strongest" conference almost invariably underperforms in the tourney. It was the strongest conference back in December. Things can change, but the statistical models don't know that. And sometimes it takes a while for teams to click. In 97, we started out badly and there were concerns whether we would make the tourney. We were at one point 3-5 in conference and I think we had no good wins. Then Ed Cota started to get it and we won 16 straight.

That happens, but when all the games are intraconference it doesn't affect the overall conference quality.

Yeah, conference strength is basically locked in by Jan 1.