While some dark days for North Carolina football are still ahead, the school will find no shortage of quality candidates for its next athletic director and head coach.
Both positions are among the most attractive in college athletics. That will not change regardless of how the NCAA investigation concludes.
Firing Butch Davis may or may not result in softer reprimands by the NCAA, but it's difficult to imagine that the Tar Heels won't lose a few scholarships, forfeit a few wins and possibly face a fine.
But once the debris is removed and the punishments have been served, the advantages of the program will be much the same as it has been dating back to the Charlie Justice Era.
For the foreseeable future, Carolina will be a big state-operated school with a big stadium, fancy facilities, thousands of loyal fans, a popular spot to visit among recruits and a conference that hardly has a suffocating football reputation.
But before anything can take shape, a question about football's status on campus must be addressed by the Board of Trustees and administration.
The decision to bring in Davis after the 2006 season generally took Carolina into new football territory. Compared to past hires - from Jim Hickey in 1959 and continuing through John Bunting in 2001 - Davis was an all-in venture to pursue national championships and top-dollar bowl games. The school hadn't attempted such an aggressive football move since Jim Tatum was lured away from Maryland after the 1955 season.
Instead of hitting it big in football with Davis, the school wound buying big, ugly trouble.
There's a chance the school's appetite for football glory will be dulled to some extent as a result of the Davis experience.
Where to go next and how to get there in football are topics that almost certainly will dictate the search for Dick Baddour's replacement as AD. There will be a host of applicants and potential targets, but the next AD will have to be given a clearly marked football blueprint by the Board and chancellor.
The prudent move might to be talk more about winning an ACC championship and talk less about trying to win national titles.
No matter how that debate is settled, plenty of fully qualified coaches will be interested in landing the job - whether UNC quietly scales back or not.
The new coach will be under closer scrutiny and there surely will be tighter management of the school's academic assistance program.
But until the ACC gets significantly stronger top to bottom in football, Carolina should always be a program capable of winning seven or more games a season even without having to pay the head coach $2.5 million a year. For that matter, the 2011 team should win at least seven even without Davis in charge. No one understands that potential more than coaches.
The head coaches hired by Baddour since Mack Brown left for Texas after the 1997 regular season haven't been totally consistent winners.
But for all of the changes and sometimes perplexing hires, UNC has had more than enough overall talent to get to a bowl game each season since Brown rebuilt the recruiting network in the late 1980s.
"There's no excuse whatsoever for not being able to recruit to this school," Brown said even as his first two teams were going 1-10.
Coaches know that. And if the school makes a sound decision about the next AD, a quality coach will be found with relative ease.
