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I am perfectly familiar with Dean's first five years. I find them completely irrelevant to this conversation. That was 65 years ago in what might as well have been a completely different sport.
Hubert Davis Catch-all
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stankeylegjones
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I never understand this argument. It's similar to the argument folks made when HD was hired, "It worked with Roy." Yes, sometimes you have an exception. Vast majority of the time, it doesn't work out like it did for a coach who found incredible success after several years of not finding success. There is a reason why those coaches are the exception.
superrific
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I'm not deep into the "move on from HD" camp as some other posters. I would agree that Dean's first 5 years are not particularly relevant. I mean, I guess they aren't *totally* irrelevant but the arguments for and against would have to be truly in equipoise for me to think about it.
I think characterizing 2/3 of that season as awful is an overreach. I don't think you can win 80% of your last 21 games (54% of the season) and it be awful for 2/3. Also, the preceding 18 games we won 67% (12-6), which isn't great, but it's not like we lost to the sisters of the poor. The six losses were to 29-8 Purdue (N), 27-8 Tenn (N), 26-8 UK (N), 24-11 ND (A), 26-11 Miami (A) and 25-10 WF (A). Certainly that stretch was not up to UNC standards, but it wasn't terrible enough to completely ruin a season that we ended in the National Championship game with two of our best wins ever and ending the year on a 17-4 run. That was not a bad season.
On the second point, I guess we are now dinging Davis for not winning in a certain way? The two games out west that we lost were very bad and I agree it's part of an overall inconsistency that needs to be addressed, but I just feel like it's unnecessary to denigrate actual good and fun seasons and actual wins (Wake and FSU) to make that case. Sometimes good teams win close games. Seasons two and four were complete busts and stand alone in providing enough data to judge Davis' record as inadequate. Seasons one, three and this season are all in his favor, although this season is not yet complete.
I just want to clarify that I don't blame anyone for being on the side of wanting Davis removed. Heck, I lean towards him not being the guy based on what we've seen so far. I just want a fair accounting and I can't get on board with a season that was one of the most fun we've ever had being characterized as bad.
donbosco
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What argument?
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Dean Smith was excoriated by fans at the beginning of his career. The fans who want HD to be fired now definitely would have wanted Dean to be fired. I think it's fair to acknowledge that. But that doesn't mean that every coach who starts poorly (and I don't think that's a correct description of HD) will turn into an all time great.
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I get annoyed by all the posts I see saying HD is a terrible coach... or not a college level coach. And I know most are not saying that, but the posts are constant (at least over on IC). This sort of hyperbole does not help. There is absolutely no world where a coach who took a team to the NC game in his first year of coaching is a terrible coach who should not be coaching at the college level.
Now this does not necessarily make him a great coach. Maybe he's a bit of a one hit wonder who peaked in his very first season. But terrible coaches do not make it to the Final 4. Especially not by beating your archrival in the Final Four with 4 first round draft picks to your zero.
Now this does not necessarily make him a great coach. Maybe he's a bit of a one hit wonder who peaked in his very first season. But terrible coaches do not make it to the Final 4. Especially not by beating your archrival in the Final Four with 4 first round draft picks to your zero.
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We started that 2021-22 season ranked 19th in the preseason polls. On February 19th, 2022, before we played VT that day, we were sitting at 18-8/10-5 and 49th at KenPom. We would almost certainly have missed the tournament had the season ended then. We had only two wins that would ultimately be "tier A" wins per KenPom, and they were at home vs VT and on the road against a 17-16 Clemson team. 7 of our 10 ACC wins to that point were against teams ranked outside the KenPom top 100. And while you recite our losses, you're eliding that we had been absolutely obliterated in many of them - we lost by 17 to Tennessee, 29 to UK, 28 to Miami, 22 to Wake, 20 to Duke. And we had just suffered an absolutely atrocious home loss to a Pitt team that barely cracked the KenPom top 200. On paper it's the worst loss UNC had had in the KenPom era (1997-present) - we have never lost to a lower ranked team, whether home, road, or neutral. And not only had we lost, we had been embarrassed, trailing by 21 midway through the second half. The season to that point had absolutely been miserable. People were frustrated with the blowout losses, the lack of quality wins, and the prospect of missing the tournament. There is no sugarcoating how much of a disaster the season had been to that point.
I am not trying to dismiss how magical the next 5 games plus postseason were. It was euphoric. It was three points against KU away from basketball nirvana. Hubert deserves some credit for that. But to call the season to that earlier point anything other than terrible is just not accurate, IMO. IC was absolutely miserable, and rightfully so.
As for the west coast swing, I'm just saying it's not accurate to suggest everything this season has been "superlative" other than two games in one week. Those first five ACC games collectively cost us something like 10 spots in the efficiency metrics and 2 seed lines. It was a truly terrible 5-game stretch where we played like a terrible team. So I just don't agree with the suggestion that this season has been great other than those two games in California.
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I generally agree with you - Hubert is clearly not an awful college coach and those posts are hyperbolic - but I think focusing on tournament results over regular season results is a good way to make bad decisions. Single-elimination tournaments are fluky, by nature. Teams and coaches who aren't that great get hot in the tournament all the time. State gave Kevin Keatts a big raise based on a magical postseason run in the ACCT/NCAAT that, to State fans, almost certainly felt just as magical as our run in 2021-22. It was the greatest month of NC State basketball in 40 years. But that, rightly, didn't keep Keatts from getting fired just one year later. One hot month didn't trump several years of otherwise mediocre results; nor should it.
Every UNC fan should treasure that run in 2022. It should make us absolutely deliriously happy to think about. But it should not distract us from the fact that outside of that magical run, Hubert's tenure has not met the standard to which we hold UNC bball. We'll see how the next two months go, but if we get a 6 seed or lower I'm going to have a hard time making the case that he's the right guy to lead the program (unless he can pull another magical March run out of a hat).
I think a lot of our disagreement stems from the fact that you are judging Davis based on efficiency metrics and I'm judging it based on actual wins and losses. As of today Louisville is 13 spots ahead of us on Kenpom, even after we beat them last night and have beaten a much more impressive roster of teams this year. So excuse me if I don't care where Kenpom had us ranked. Point being, the teams we lost to were good teams and we beat everyone else leading up to the last half of the season winning at an 80% clip and humiliating our hated rival and their undead koach. You can call that a bad season, but I will never agree with it.
Admittedly, year 2, but ...
Mike Davis admits he wasn’t ready at Indiana. But he’s ready to prove himself at Detroit Mercy
Mike Davis has had a long coaching journey, but he's learned a lot along the way.
www.ncaa.com
And yet, people like you don’t recognize how it’s a completely different sport, again. Dean’s first 5 years are very relevant here.
You’re applying your very subjective standards and passing them off as objective, and moving goalposts where you see fit, just to vent your frustrations with HD. And dismissing whatever doesn’t serve you along the way.
Not great but a great improvement and the fact that SMU, Cal and Stanford losses were all because of tremendous three point shooting and last night demonstrates how far our defense against the three has come helps make that point.
Fwiw, I do have a different point of view because when I started watching UNC basketball, we weren't actually an elite basketball program and it took a while for it to sink in. It wasn't even that important, reflecting the conditions under which Dean took over the program. He was directly told that on court success was not unimportant but the overall character of the program was.
Now, all of us loved becoming an elite program but we loved most that the players mostly reflected the values of the school and mostly were very much student athletes. You only have to look at the pictures from Sutton's to see that. So, in many ways, even the teams that didn't succeed were just as important. Now, we had a hell of a lot more continuity in personnel, it was more a village atmosphere and was not nearly the national attraction it is now.
That makes it easier for me to be patient. I can wait a little longer and take a little slower success to keep in touch with more of the old traditions. Part of that is that I really feel like that can be greatly to our benefit in the future if new policies encourage better retention and continuity within programs.
I get that might well mean the game has just passed me by. It has every decade for the last 50 years so it probably will with you, too.
Fwiw, I do have a different point of view because when I started watching UNC basketball, we weren't actually an elite basketball program and it took a while for it to sink in. It wasn't even that important, reflecting the conditions under which Dean took over the program. He was directly told that on court success was not unimportant but the overall character of the program was.
Now, all of us loved becoming an elite program but we loved most that the players mostly reflected the values of the school and mostly were very much student athletes. You only have to look at the pictures from Sutton's to see that. So, in many ways, even the teams that didn't succeed were just as important. Now, we had a hell of a lot more continuity in personnel, it was more a village atmosphere and was not nearly the national attraction it is now.
That makes it easier for me to be patient. I can wait a little longer and take a little slower success to keep in touch with more of the old traditions. Part of that is that I really feel like that can be greatly to our benefit in the future if new policies encourage better retention and continuity within programs.
I get that might well mean the game has just passed me by. It has every decade for the last 50 years so it probably will with you, too.
stankeylegjones
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I thought you were talking about Dean's first five years, how poor they were compared to his tenure after that.
stankeylegjones
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I would argue that the chances of starting "poorly" and turning into a great coach are small.
superrific
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They are much, much less relevant than the first 5 years of college basketball coaches in the aggregate. I don't know what those statistics say. I do know it is objectively bad decision-making to assign significance to a single data point from six decades ago.
superrific
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The only thing that matters is predictive ability. Whether or not the season was bad, what does it say about the likely future? That strikes me as the question that should be asked.
I was at that game last night. Had great seats. Early lville was getting shots they wanted and we were not. That changed. We now have come back down double digits to beat Virginia dook and Louisville. A week ago after state the buzz on IC is we would perhaps lose out. We gutted it out against Syracuse and played the most inspired defense of the year to beat lville. If we hold serve when we go to dook next week decent chance we are playing for a no. 2 seed. Oh yes Syracuse and lville we handled without our lottery pick. We have no. 1 PG and no.2 overall player coming in with another top 20 guy. My guess is this team will return several.key players, including Dixon Stevenson Luka Henri high and veesaar. I prefer looking ahead to backward. Hubert coached his ass off last night. Apparently I settle for mediocrity but I go to games, have season tickets, write checks and a half million dollar endowment in family name when I am dead. I feel good about the state of the program. I think Hubert continues to grow.
ETA. Did not intend to attach to finesses comments.
1. I am not sure that our 3 point defense is that much better. Louisville was bricking at various points in the game -- something it does frequently on the road. McNealy missed several wide open threes. We didn't have the same luck with Okouri at Stanford, Boopie at SMU, and that Eminem looking dude for Cal. As Roy always said, sometimes everything looks better when the ball goes (or doesn't go) in the basket.
2. The expectations for a coach of a non-elite program are necessarily less than of an elite program. Hubert is measured on a totally different scale and time table than Dean. Hubert has advantages over the competition that Dean could only dream of having in the 1960s.