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UNC should honor tradition in coaching search. There's one candidate who makes sense
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- UNC should honor tradition in coaching search. There's one candidate who makes sense
North Carolina basketball , built by the vision of program patriarch Dean E. Smith , having achieved maximum success under former coach Roy Williams , is at crossroads to maintain its relevancy after five uneven seasons under coach Hubert Davis.
The easy route to replace Davis, who was fired after five seasons on Tuesday March 24, would be to go outside of the "Carolina Family." And there is a real struggle taking place right now in Chapel Hill, N.C., between honoring tradition and paving the way forward in a new world of college sports.
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Before outgoing athletic director Bubba Cunningham and AD in-waiting Steve Newmark decide on a new coach, they must take strong look at Jerry Stackhouse.
Why was Hubert Davis fired? North Carolina says it 'must move forward'
There will be more names of potential candidates, who have won big like Gonzaga's Mark Few, Michigan's Dusty May and Billy Donovan with the Chicago Bulls.
Stackhouse is the most credible former UNC player or coach not named Roy Williams or Larry Brown who could take the job. And Carolina being Carolina, the first look should always be from within even when, on the surface, there's not an obvious choice like Williams when he returned in 2003.
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UNC has always viewed itself from within as being above the fray in college athletics. Pursuing Stackhouse might be the last way to show it, because in some respects, the Tar Heels have become what they once despised.
The hiring of Bill Belichick as football coach was conducted by a shadow search by John Preyer, the former head of the Board of Trustees, that was so shady it would have made Marshall Mathers proud.
After the coaching search, they'll get back to debating whether to build a new basketball arena as the centerpiece of a new project to create the "Carolina North" part of campus; or stay in the Dean E. Smith Center, the home of the Tar Heels since 1986.
There wasn't much of a discussion at all, it seemed the administration was just going to push it forward, until Williams released a video lobbying for the team to keep calling the Smith Center home. The tug of staying true or moving on to something new is at the heart of many decisions facing UNC Athletics right now.
A new arena would have suites and box seats to help Carolina max out revenue streams that are necessities in this new era. But staying connected to Dean Smith in any form can't be easily dismissed.
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That's why it's imperative to exhaust all avenues of a coach with ties to Smith before moving on.
Davis was the right coach for Carolina at the wrong time in college basketball.
His respect for tradition didn't mesh a generation that has a short attention span. Footage from their run to the 2022 Final Four and national championship game may as well have been an analog broadcast to these kids.
Davis passed on players who could have helped his roster through his five seasons because their initial concern was about compensation. He wanted players who put Carolina first in a time where basketball mercenaries show loyalty so long as the check clears.
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While Davis has a well-deserved reputation as a gentleman coach, Stackhouse does not. In the best kind of way. His teams were tough and his demeanor has an edge to it that has been woefully missing in Chapel Hill.
He was that way as a player too. Stackhouse, of course, played two seasons under Smith and helped the Tar Heels reach the 1995 Final Four his sophomore year. (Had he not suffered a thigh contusion against Arkansas, he may have even delivered a third national title for Smith.)
Stackhouse was a two-time NBA All-Star during 18 seasons in the league, which is where he transitioned to coaching. He made a splash in his first season as a head coach by leading the Raptors 905 to a NBA G League championship in 2017.
He did have limited success during his five seasons at Vanderbilt from 2019-24 with two winning seasons and he never reached the NCAA Tournament. But he took over a program that went 0-18 in the SEC prior to his arrival and the bulk of his time in Nashville was before transfers were granted immediate eligibility and flooded the portal and before name, image and likeness (NIL) budgets became the new relationship that determined recruiting.
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Vandy basketball had among the worst NIL budgets in the SEC during Stackhouse's tenure. He took a roster with less than $100,000 in NIL budget and managed to win the conference's Coach of the Year award in 2023. His final season, he had about $500,000 to use, but that amount is still nowhere close to the nearly $5 million current coach Mark Byington has to fill his roster.
Give him the basketball resources of North Carolina and he will get the results to match.
Stackhouse was well respected among SEC coaches for the offensive sets he ran. In his current position as an assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors under coach Steve Kerr, he's becoming known as a defensive savant.
Hiring Stackhouse would not be making the same mistake twice. It would be North Carolina honoring its tradition before there's nothing left to honor.
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Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com , follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his column s.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY Sports: Why Jerry Stackhouse is right choice as next UNC basketball coach
