UNC’s coach has to deal with mounting pressure, as injuries, roster construction and rebounding woes raise doubts about whether he deserves the program’s usual benefit of the doubt.
North Carolina didn’t just stumble into March. It face-planted, and the frustration is landing squarely on coach Hubert Davis.
The Tar Heels lost Caleb Wilson for the year and was blown out by Duke to end the regular season. They lost to Clemson in their only game in the ACC Tournament. Scroll through social media, and it looks like the entire fan base wants Davis fired. That’s not going to happen, nor should it.
With Wilson on the floor, North Carolina looked like one of the best teams in the country. The Tar Heels went 5-2 against AP Top 25 opponents, including a win over Duke in one of the greatest games in the rivalry’s history and a road game at Virginia. On top of that, five-star prospects Dylan Mingo and Maximo Adams are on the way. Those are the reasons Davis will be back.
But that doesn’t mean he should get the benefit of the doubt.
The Davis era has been a roller coaster. His first team slogged through much of the 2021-22 season before catching fire, upsetting Duke in Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game and making a Cinderella run to the national title game. A year later, North Carolina opened as the preseason No. 1 and became the first team in that spot to miss the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded in 1985.
In 2023-24, the Tar Heels regrouped, started ranked 19th, won the ACC regular-season title and reached the Sweet 16. Last season, they began at No. 9, faded out of the rankings and barely reached the NCAA field through the First Four in Dayton.
That kind of swing from year to year is not what Tar Heels fans expect. It’s never easy to replace a legend like Roy Williams, especially for a first-time coach, but the standard in Chapel Hill doesn’t change.
Across the state, Duke’s transition from Krzyzewski to Jon Scheyer has looked almost seamless. Scheyer led the Blue Devils to the Final Four last season, and each year they have taken another step forward.
That contrast matters when you look at how each program handled adversity. Wilson’s injury is a legitimate setback for UNC, but the excuse wears thin when Duke was missing two starters — point guard Caleb Foster and center Patrick Ngongba II — and still won the ACC Tournament. The Blue Devils had bumps along the way, but they figured it out, beat Clemson by 12 in the semifinal and knocked off then-No. 10 Virginia in the final in Charlotte.
Moreover, it was the second straight year Duke navigated a major injury and still lifted the trophy. Last year, Cooper Flagg missed the ACC Tournament and the Blue Devils won anyway.
That’s because Duke’s roster was built to withstand hits. The Blue Devils steadied themselves even without two key pieces. North Carolina, by comparison, came apart down the stretch once it became clear Wilson wasn’t coming back.
It’s not as if UNC didn’t invest. The Tar Heels spent $14 million on this roster, bringing in Kyan Evans, Jonathan Powell, Jarin Stevenson, Henri Veesaar and Jaydon Young through the transfer portal and Luka Bogavac from Europe. Only Veesaar has consistently lived up to expectations. Bogavac has shown flashes, but his play has swung between hot and cold.
Evans was supposed to be the answer at point guard and a 3-point threat after transferring from Colorado State. Instead, he has averaged 4.1 points while shooting 32% from the field and 30% from 3-point range — a steep drop from his more than 10 points per game and 44.6% 3-point shooting with the Rams. He lost his starting job to freshman Derek Dixon, who has also struggled, shooting 36% from the field. Powell and Young haven’t made much of an impact either.
The roster was also built to fix last season’s rebounding problem. It didn’t. By the end of ACC play, this team was worse in league games in both offensive rebounding percentage (28.8) and opponent offensive rebounding percentage (29.4) than last year’s smaller group (29.8 and 26.8, respectively).
Overall, the Tar Heels rank 91st nationally in opponent offensive rebounding percentage (28.6), their worst mark since 2015-16. Making matters worse, Wilson was their best rebounder on both ends. The freshman posted a 22.2 defensive rebounding percentage, good for 88th nationally.
Those numbers and those roster decisions fall on Davis.
The injury, the rivalry with Duke, the program’s history and the power of the Carolina brand — all of that matters and all of it will help him keep his job for now. But when you strip away the emotion and look at how this team was built, how it played without its star and how it failed in the very areas it was built to fix, it becomes clear he shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
Duke lost key pieces and still looked like Duke in March. North Carolina lost one key piece and looked like a shell of the contender it was supposed to be. For a blue blood that measures itself by championships, that gap isn’t just inconvenient. It’s unacceptable.
Davis will be back. He has more talent coming, a blue blood logo behind him and enough on the resume to justify another year. But based on how this season unraveled — from roster construction to rebounding to the way the team handled adversity — he hasn’t earned unquestioned trust going forward, not from a fan base that expects more and not from a program that has always insisted it’s different.
Right now, the results say otherwise. Until those change, Hubert Davis shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
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