UNC coach built his reputation by rebuilding Miami football

North Carolina hired Butch Davis to win football games in the same manner as he did at Miami - cleanly.

Bob Winston, the chair of UNC's board of trustees, said the appeal of Davis back in November 2006 was his reputation at Miami for rebuilding and winning with integrity and without violating NCAA rules.

An NCAA investigation into the UNC program as Davis enters his fourth season has not changed that reputation, Winston said, nor has it changed Winston's opinion of Davis.

"He had a great reputation when we hired him," Winston said. "And he still does. That was important to us [UNC's board of trustees] when we hired him, and we have been very impressed with the way he has run the program."

The NCAA investigation into whether receiver Greg Little and defensive tackle Marvin Austin had improper contacts with agents is the first in Davis' nine seasons as a college head coach.

During his six-year run at Miami, where he made his name from 1995 to 2000, Davis helped revive a program that had been ravaged by NCAA violations, including fraudulent student loans and a pay-for-play scheme under previous coach Dennis Erickson.

Davis has declined to comment about the current NCAA investigation. On Monday at the ACC Kickoff in Greensboro, Davis said he did not know when the NCAA would make a decision about whether any rules were broken.

In his 67-minute interview session with the ACC media, though, Davis spoke in general terms about a football coach's role in controlling a program and keeping it off the NCAA's radar.

"All you can do is give [players] an opinion. You cannot tell them what they should or shouldn't do," Davis said.

Cleaning up a mess

The first time Davis coached at Miami, he was an assistant to Jimmy Johnson from 1984 to 1988. The Hurricanes won their second of five national titles in 1987, and when Johnson left for the Dallas Cowboys a year later, Davis went with him.

Meanwhile, at Miami, the Canes won two national titles and played for a third under Erickson from 1989 to 1994.

After the NCAA found a former academic advisor fraudulently obtained approximately $200,000 in Pell Grant funds, it pulled 31 scholarships and put the Canes on a one-year bowl ban.

In 1995, Miami president Tad Foote hired Davis back from the Cowboys as head coach to clean up the "mess," as current Florida International athletic director Pete Garcia put it.

"The purpose of the sanctions were to kill the program," said Garcia, who worked as Davis' director of football operations at Miami.

The ESPN documentary, "The U," which focuses on the program's on-field accomplishments and loose off-field reputation, portrays Davis as a killjoy, a boy scout picking up the empties after a decade-long party at South Beach.

The first commentary on Davis in the two-hour documentary comes at the 1:54 mark from Luther Campbell, the former front man for the rap group "2 Live Crew" and a friend of the football program.

"It was just like making Tad Foote the coach, when they made Butch the coach," Campbell said in the documentary. "They changed us from national champs to national chumps."

Andre King, who played for Davis at Miami and with the Cleveland Browns, has a different interpretation.

"Tell Luther to look at the script," said King, in reference to the 28 first-round NFL draft picks Davis either coached or recruited at Miami. "Butch's track record speaks for itself."

The people at Miami who worked with Davis to clean up the NCAA rubble use the words discipline, no-nonsense and honest to describe Davis. Betty Amos chaired Miami's audit and compliance committee during Davis' tenure. She said Davis took a difficult situation and turned it around in short time without taking any shortcuts.

"I have the highest admiration for him," said Amos, a senior member of the university's board of trustees. "He is a man of his word and integrity. Players knew that they would have to toe the line to play for him."

Davis quickly delivered his message that the new boss wasn't the same as the old. Before Davis' first game in 1995, he suspended his best receiver for the season and expelled two other players. After finding two players took a limousine ride set up by an agent, he suspended them two games each.

"He came in and got rid of the players who weren't of high character and didn't want to do things the right way," said King, a walk-on receiver who ended up playing four seasons in the NFL.

Davis cleaned up the periphery of the program, too. Campbell, and other characters "riding the bandwagon," King said, were banned from the sidelines, which had turned into a cocktail party. Davis wanted the current players involved with Miami alumni in the NFL, like All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis.

The former players came back and worked out in the offseason with the current players, "throwing the rope back over the fence," as King put it.

Progress on the field was slower by comparison. His third team, in 1997, the one most affected by the loss of scholarships, went 5-6, the program's first losing season in 18 years.

After a pair of nine-win seasons, the Canes broke through with an 11-1 record in Davis' sixth season. Twenty-nine days after beating Florida in the Orange Bowl, Davis left for the Cleveland Browns.

"He set them up for two national titles, and we should have been in the title game in 2000," Garcia said. "On and off the field, he always did things the right way."

The players Davis left behind at Miami would go on to win their next 24 games, including the 2001 national title.

'Weeding out'

After replacing John Bunting in 2006, Davis followed the same template at UNC that he used at Miami.

He dismissed five players in his first year, four more during his second year and one last year. Sixteen other players, for a variety of reasons, have left the program with at least a season of eligibility remaining.

T.J. Yates, a fifth-year senior, said there was a noticeable difference in Davis' approach to discipline compared with Bunting's.

"In every program, there are guys that can be a cancer to the team," Yates said. "You look around the locker room, and there aren't many of those guys [left]. He has done a good job of weeding out the bad parts of the team."

The punishments handed out by Davis since the summer of 2009 have been mostly handled "internally," which Davis has qualified in the past as community service and extra conditioning work at practice.

He suspended freshman defensive end Donte Paige-Moss for the Meineke Bowl after a postgame incident in the Tar Heels' season-ending loss to N.C. State on Nov. 28. Paige-Moss had previously been involved a fight with a teammate before the 2009 season but did not miss any game time.

All-ACC linebacker Quan Sturdivant, who was arrested for simple marijuana possession on July 10, will not be suspended for the 2010 opener against Louisiana State, Davis said. (Sturdivant's charge was voluntarily dismissed Monday in Stanly County.)

Winston said the NCAA investigation raises concerns but referred to it as an isolated incident.

"There's no reason to believe this is reflective of a widespread problem in the football program," Winston said.

"What I would look at, is as an institution are we on the right track as a whole? Are we doing the right things that represent UNC? I would say we absolutely feel we are."