When Roy Williams retired last week, after 33 seasons as a head coach in North Carolina, there was widespread speculation about who would take the place of a man who won three NCAA championships in one of the best programs in the country.
That speculation ended on Monday, hours before the national championship game, when the school named Hubert Davis, 50, as Williams’ successor. Davis, who helped lead the Tar Heels until the 1991 Final Four and most recently served as Williams’ associate head coach, becomes the first black head coach in the program’s history.
Hubert Davis: “I am ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฑ, ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ป๐ธ๐ณ๐๐น, ๐ต๐๐บ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ๐ฑ, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ to be your new male basketball coach for the University of North Carolina.”#CarolinaFamily pic.twitter.com/Lev1CwyTQD
– Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) April 5, 2021
Davis was set to be formally introduced during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“I am honored and honored to have the opportunity to lead this program, ” Davis said in a statement.
โI love this university. I played here, I graduated here, I fell in love with my wife here, I married here, I moved here after I retired from the NBA and raised my family here โ, he added. โI am proud to lead this team and I can’t wait for everything to come.โ
Several teams from the Big 12 were also busy on the coaches’ carousel. Oklahoma on Friday named former Loyola-Chicago coach Porter Moser as the successor to Lon Krueger, who retired at 68. Krueger was one of only three coaches (along with Tubby Smith and Rick Pitino) to lead five universities for the NCAA tournament. Moser, 52, was 188-140 (0.573) in 10 seasons in Loyola and led the Ramblers in a surprise run for the Final Four in 2018, with assistance from Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, and then an appearance in the round of 16 this season .
The news from Moser came on the same day that Kansas signed a lifetime contract with Bill Self and the day after Texas hired Chris Beard from rival Big 12, Texas Tech.
Self won a championship in 2008, but Kansas was recently under NCAA scrutiny after the federal government’s investigation into college basketball corruption. The Self contract contains a clause that the university will not dismiss you for cause “due to any matter of infringement involving conduct that occurred on or before the date of full execution of this contract.”
Beard took Texas Tech to the 2019 championship game, where the Red Raiders lost to Virginia. He started his career as a graduate assistant in Texas.
Texas Tech had several players entering the transfer portal, and it is possible that some of them could follow Beard to Texas.
At the Big East, Marquette replaced the dismissed Steve Wojciechowski with Shaka Smart, who grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and has ties to the area. In six seasons in Texas, Smart failed to win a game in the NCAA tournament, and this year, the Longhorns with third place in the ranking were surprised in the first round by Abilene Christian, with 14th place.
At DePaul, the school is replacing Dave Leitao with Oregon’s longtime assistant coach Tony Stubblefield. Big East will now have six black coaches among 11 male basketball teams.
Gonzaga is trying to become the first male team to finish unbeaten since Bob Knight’s team in Indiana went 32-0 on the way to the 1976 national championship. The Bulldogs also seek their first NCAA title, although they have had many deep runs in tournaments. They lost in the 2017 title dispute to a North Carolina team coached by Roy Williams, who announced his retirement on Friday and had three titles in his career.
Coach Scott Drew and Baylor also seek the first national championship in their program. The Bears are appearing in the title game for the first time since 1948.
“Incredible, we worked hard in this one-season battle, but we stayed together,” said guard Jalen Suggs, a Gonzaga freshman, in a television interview after draining the chance of a 93-90 victory over UCLA on Saturday . night.
“I can’t put it into words, making dreams come true and now we are ready for Baylor,” said Suggs. “They are a difficult team.”
Even though Gonzaga hasn’t lost since February 22, 2020, against Brigham Young, the Bears have history on their side. This is only the fifth time, since the beginning of the poll of the preseason of the 25 best of the Associated Press, in the beginning of the 1960s, that the teams classified in 1 ยฐ (Gonzaga) and 2 ยฐ (Baylor) face each other in the game of title. Each of the previous four games was won by the team ranked second: Cincinnati over Ohio State in 1962, UCLA over Michigan in 1965, UConn over Duke in 1999 and Duke over Arizona in 2001.
Led by Drew Timme’s 25 points, Gonzaga put 56 points in the painting against UCLA, and the Bears will have to have an answer for that. Baylor is commanded by experienced guards and wards, and his frontline players Mark Vital and Flo Thamba are solid, if not spectacular.
Baylor is led by a fully American junior guard, Jared Butler, who scored 17 points in Houston’s semifinal defeat, and another junior guard, Davion Mitchell, who gave 12 assists with 11 points in the Bears’ 78-59 victory. After last year’s tournament was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, Butler and senior guard MaCio Teague tested the waters of the NBA draft, but opted to go back for another shot at the title.
“That was one of my goals, and I know some of my teammates’ goals, just to leave a legacy in Baylor, to create Baylor like blue blood,” said Butler.
Larry Bird’s Indiana State team was 33-0 when they entered the game for the 1979 title against Magic Johnson and Michigan State.
Michigan State featured not only Johnson, then a sophomore, but also Greg Kelser, a six-foot forward who was later chosen in the first round of the NBA draft.
“We felt that our zone could affect them,” Johnson said on CBS before the semifinal games. โWe doubled Larry every chance we had and were able to win,โ 75-64.
Bird averaged 28.6 points, 14.9 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game during his junior season, after averaging 30 points as a sophomore and almost 33 as a freshman. In the national semifinal against DePaul, he made 16 of 19 field shots and had 16 rebounds and nine assists.
Johnson, like many others in the basketball world, was waiting for a Gonzaga-Baylor final to enter the Final Four.
“Gonzaga is a very balanced team, they can shoot from the outside, they have great players on the inside,” he said. โAnd that is what we say with Baylor, they were dominant both inside and outside.
“The two best college basketball teams were Baylor and Gonzaga for the entire season.”
Jalen Suggs is expected to be among the top three choices in this year’s draft on 29 July.
Only one player in the past decade has won an NCAA championship and became No. 1 choice: Anthony Davis, from Kentucky, in 2012.
Oklahoma’s freshman year-old Cade Cunningham and Southern California freshman Evan Mobley are likely to be among the top picks along with Suggs, with many simulated drafts projecting Cunningham in the first place.
But Brian Sandifer, the director of the Grassroots Sizzle program that Suggs played for, believes that the six-foot-tall Minnesota native deserves to be the first choice in part because of his winning record. As a defender at the Minnehaha Academy, Suggs’ team scored 25-1 and appeared in two state championships, winning one. He was recruited by Ohio State and Notre Dame, among others, to play football.
“Jalen Suggs is the best player in the draft, period,” Sandifer said in a telephone interview. โI never wavered from that. If you look at how they play and check the curriculum of all the kids, Jalen Suggs won at every level he played, football, basketball, whatever. “