On Aug. 2, 1961, North Carolina announced it was promoting a 30-year-old men’s basketball assistant coach named Dean Smith to the top job. Amid little fanfare, a coaching tree took root that day. It grew into the Carolina Way and eventually became the strongest thing in the college basketball forest.
It has endured ever since, across 65 years, a towering permanence amid constant change across the college sports landscape.
Until now. It’s time, at last, for the Tar Heels to leave the Dean Smith family and branch out into a vastly different future.
The school and current coach Hubert Davis are parting ways, after Davis has held the baton for the last five seasons. It was passed to him by Roy Williams, who took it previously from Matt Doherty, who took it from Bill Guthridge, who succeeded Smith himself. Sixty-five years, five men who all played and/or coached under Smith, one overarching way of doing things.
They sustained a singular program ethos beyond anything high-level college basketball has seen. During this multigenerational run, North Carolina won five national championships and played in 19 Final Fours—Smith won two of those titles and Williams won the other three, and they combined to take the Heels to 16 of those Final Fours. Guthridge (two) and Davis (one) also contributed to the Final Four total. Even Doherty won 26 games in the first of his three seasons.
As the ground shifts in Chapel Hill, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate what grew there. Most winning athletic programs have tried to make “family” hires that maintain what a program patriarch built; few did it as faithfully and successfully as Carolina has in men’s basketball. Williams was the key to that, winning big and doing so as a zealous extension of Smith’s vision.
Now comes the end of the lineage—there are no viable successors in the pipeline with family ties. Meanwhile, there will be many A-list outside candidates from which to choose.
That could have been the case the last time the job opened as well, after Williams’s retirement in 2021. But Roy made clear what his wishes were, and they were not unreasonable wishes given who Williams is and what he accomplished. Davis, a star player under Smith and an assistant under Williams for nine years, was the logical choice.
Don’t discount Davis’s additions to program lore. Tar Heels fans will never forget that he has the two greatest victories in the history of the North Carolina–Duke rivalry on his record—beating Mike Krzyzewski in his last game in Cameron Indoor Stadium and then ending Coach K’s career in the 2022 Final Four. Davis also won the 2024 Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title and earned a No. 1 NCAA tournament seed.
He did some very good work. Just not enough of it.
Interspersed among the high points were these lows: missing the 2023 tournament altogether; being upset by Alabama in the Sweet 16 with that ACC champion team; barely scraping into the tourney last year, being dispatched to Dayton for the First Four and losing in the first round to Mississippi; and the backbreaker, the brutal first-round collapse last week against VCU after taking a 19-point lead with fewer than 15 minutes left.
That loss changed the dynamics around Davis. His job security had been a topic of discussion for years, but didn’t seem like a front-burner issue until the VCU fiasco.
Parting ways with Davis dovetails with another potential chop-down-the-family-tree basketball decision. A fight has been brewing for months over leaving the Dean E. Smith Center—the fabled “Dean Dome”—in the heart of campus and building a new arena miles away in a campus extension development dubbed “Carolina North.”
The positions on either side of whether to stay in the Dean Dome or move are well-worn in the world of athletic venue angst. Proponents of a new arena say the 40-year-old facility is in need of expensive repairs and upgrades, and notably lacking in luxury-seating revenue capability. Advocates of staying see the building as a tradition-rich treasure that serves as a campus anchor and honors the culture that Smith created.
Whatever venue makes the most money usually wins, especially in the current revenue-share/NIL era of paying players. That will probably be the case at Carolina. But the number of prominent voices who have come out against the plan is notable, and an indication of what could be perceived as a battle for the soul of North Carolina athletics.
The school dove into a new football era last year with the mold-shattering hire of former NFL coaching legend Bill Belichick, paying him a fortune to radically remake a historically underachieving program. Year 1 was a bust; we’ll see about Year 2.
Meanwhile, longtime athletic director Bubba Cunningham is on the way out, to be succeeded this summer by former NASCAR executive Steve Newmark. That tracks with the current trend nationally of moving away from career campus administrators and toward people who specialize in revenue generation.
The confluence of paradigm-shifting events has unsettled many backers of a school that has done things a certain way for a very long time. It’s a lot at once: expensive football experiment; a potential abandoning of a cherished arena; an inevitable departure from the hero coach’s lineage.
But this is the modern reality: every power-conference school needs to take a big swing at football success; tens of millions of dollars are needed to pay players, and a new arena could generate some of that; and no coaching tree grows forever. Not even Dean Smith’s.
There is no next Dean Disciple up. There is not another qualified Roy Boy in the pipeline. After 65 years of remarkable fidelity to a Carolina Way, the time has come for a new direction in North Carolina basketball.
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