Welcome to North Carolina’s offseason of discontent.
The Tar Heels blew a 19-point lead against No. 11 seed VCU in Thursday’s first-round NCAA Tournament game in Greenville, S.C. It is the second consecutive year that UNC has failed to advance past the first round of the tournament.
Coach Hubert Davis’ future will be the No. 1 talking point moving forward , displacing, for now, the great debate over the future of the Smith Center.
Asked about the back-to-back early exits after the loss, Davis said: “That’s a big thinking question, and I apologize, I’m just not there right now. Just really sad that we’re not continuing to play and to move forward.”
Even if Davis wasn’t ready for that conversation, everybody else is.
“North Carolina can either keep Hubert Davis another year as head coach or it can get serious about its basketball program, but it cannot do both,” Dan Wolken of Yahoo! Sports wrote after the VCU loss.
The conversations about Davis’ future have been percolating among North Carolina fans — and administrators — since last year when the Tar Heels were the final team into the NCAA Tournament.
“He has helped me grow, he’s helped me persevere and he’s helped me become a better man,” senior Seth Trimble said after the VCU loss. “Everybody has their flaws. Coach Davis, he isn’t the perfect coach. But he’s a coach that’s made me better. He’s a coach that’s made guys better and he’s shown that he can win here. I know he gets hate. Over the last four years, I know he’s gotten a lot of it, but I’m going to continue to ride with him.”
This season, seen as a make-or-break year, started well. Buoyed by the play and personality of star freshman Caleb Wilson, the Tar Heels climbed to as high as No. 11 in The Associated Press poll and beat fellow blue bloods Kansas, Kentucky and Duke in the same season for the first time since their national championship year of 1982.Trimble’s game-winning 3-pointer in the final seconds to beat Duke in Chapel Hill was a highlight for the ages.
But Wilson was injured in the next game against Miami and didn’t return to the lineup after that, greatly diminishing the team’s ceiling. His absence forced other players into bigger roles. UNC suffered a blowout loss at NC State without Wilson and Henri Veessar, an Arizona transfer who became the team’s go-to offensive player without Wilson. Even with Veesaar, the Tar Heels lost to Duke, Clemson in the ACC Tournament and VCU to close the season.
“He’s done a great job,” Veesaar said after the VCU loss. “At the end of the year, I feel like we were at a really good spot and then, obviously, Caleb’s injury, I think that affects our season. I don’t want to put it on that. I feel like we had enough in this group where we could have made a run, beat the teams that we lost to at the end of the season. I just feel like we didn’t do a good job of closing out the games.”
Wilson’s absence complicates the decision. Where would the Tar Heels have been had the 6-foot-10 star not gotten hurt? Also a factor: Duke, which like UNC had to replace a legendary coach, has won the regular season and ACC titles in back-to-back seasons and Jon Scheyer shows no sign of slowing down on the recruiting trail or the court. Duke has won three ACC titles in four seasons under Scheyer.
UNC has none under Davis, who is 125-54 in five seasons since replacing Roy Williams, who won three national titles at UNC. The Tar Heels have reached the NCAA Tournament four times in those five seasons, but just once have they been seeded higher than No. 6.
In 18 seasons under Williams, the Tar Heels either missed the tournament (2010, 2020) or were eliminated in the first round (2021) three times. Under Davis, it’s happened three times in the last four seasons.
Davis signed a two-year extension in July 2025, extending his contract through the 2029-30 season. The deal increased his base salary from $400,000 to $1.25 million. Davis’ total compensation was $3.85 million this season and grows by $100,000 each year in his current contract. If Davis were to be fired this offseason, the Tar Heels would owe his base salary for each of the four remaining years on the contract.
The UNC athletics department is undergoing significant change and challenges. Longtime athletics director Bubba Cunningham will move into a different role in July and former NASCAR executive Steve Newmark will take over. Newmark joined the department last year. There is the ongoing arena debate, which has caused division among former players, longtime supporters and the administration.
And there’s football, where Chancellor Lee Roberts went for a big splash in hiring NFL coaching legend Bill Belichick. Belichick brought tremendous buzz and attention to the program, but the Tar Heels went an ugly 4-8 in the first season of his five-year, $50-million contract. The Tar Heels have turned over their roster again this offseason and face a much tougher schedule.
Davis is a Tar Heel lifer. He played and starred at UNC under Dean Smith, like his uncle, Walter Davis. After a 12-year NBA career and seven years at ESPN as a college basketball analyst, Davis joined the Tar Heels staff in 2012 under Williams.
Davis led North Carolina to the NCAA Tournament final in 2022, his first season. The Tar Heels, who were a bubble team in February, got hot down the stretch, beating Duke in coach Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game. A No. 8 seed, the Tar Heels reached the Final Four and beat Duke and Coach K again before losing to Kansas in the national title game.
The Tar Heels opened 2023 as preseason No. 1. Davis and his players reenacted a famous Sports Illustrated cover photo that featured Dean Smith and Michael Jordan. But the team struggled against top competition, finished 20-13 and missed the NCAA Tournament entirely.
In 2024, UNC won the ACC regular-season title and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, reaching as high as No. 3 in the polls. The Tar Heels reached the Sweet 16 before losing to Alabama.
In 2025, UNC squeaked into the NCAA Tournament as the last team in. Athletics director Bubba Cunningham was the chairman of the selection committee. UNC won its First Four game, but lost in the first round.