Changes in UNC basketball program reflect Hubert Davis’ tenuous position

The single most important season of Hubert Davis’ coaching career so far, the one that will determine not only his future but perhaps the future of a North Carolina basketball program at risk of slipping from among the elite, begins amid a wave of change in an institution that was built upon — and relied upon — a bedrock of tradition and continuity that goes back decades.

In the past year, North Carolina became one of the last powerhouse programs to bring in a general manager to handle personnel matters when agent Jim Tanner was hired in February. The Tar Heels dipped more heavily into the transfer portal than ever before, bringing in six players from elsewhere.

There’s also more money to spend on players, thanks not only to the revenue-sharing from the House settlement but as the equal-and-opposite reaction to the millions suddenly thrown at the football program. Meanwhile, Zayden High was welcomed back to the program after his suspension for sexual misconduct and the junior varsity program Dean Smith started and Davis once coached is gone, after 52 years.

In some places, all of that may not be unusual, but it is in Chapel Hill. And for it all to happen at once this deep in an established coach’s tenure is a tacit admission that some course correction was needed for a program that has met its own established, lofty standards in the regular season only once in Davis’ four years in charge.

Slipping into the NCAA tournament through the back door, as the Tar Heels have done twice under Davis, is supposed to be a once-in-a-generation event at North Carolina, and missing it entirely, as the Tar Heels did in 2023, even less often. Davis’ record is certainly reinforced by the way his first team picked up speed late to ruin Mike Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron and end his career in the long-awaited, long-feared meeting in the Final Four, coming within a possession of a national title, but he knows as well as anyone that the bar is set higher.

“I feel the same way I have felt the last four years,” Davis said Tuesday, meeting with the media for the first time since the first-round loss to Mississippi in Milwaukee. “There is a pressure and an expectation for us to be good this year. But that pressure and that expectation for us to be good is no different than any other year. The standard is at the highest here. I always talk to the guys, the standard is the standard. There’s an expectation every year for us to reach that standard.”

As pressure on Davis mounts — and it certainly doesn’t help that N.C. State and Duke have both won ACC titles and gone to the Final Four since North Carolina last did either — this certainly appears to be a make-or-break season for him, and the changes to the program at large certainly reflect that, as does a roster that returns only one key contributor from a year ago, the invaluable Seth Trimble.

Davis said he wanted to get bigger and more versatile across the lineup — an echo of Jon Scheyer’s plan at Duke a year ago — and the new players certainly reflect that. Arizona’s Henri Veesaar gives the Tar Heels the defensive pivot they have lacked in recent years. Colorado State’s Kyan Evans and Virginia Tech’s Jaydon Young, who blew up for the Hokies late last season, are outside threats. Jarin Stevenson arrives back home after two years at Alabama. And there are the usual impact freshmen, led by forward Caleb Wilson, ESPN’s No. 5 recruit nationally, and 22-year-old, 6-foot-6 Montenegrin swingman Luka Bogavac.

It’s hard, in September, to get a sense of how all of that will mix together, especially at a program where this kind of roster turnover is the exception rather than the rule, but at least on paper there’s enough talent to be a top-25 team that’s in the conversation with ACC favorite Duke and clear No. 2 Louisville atop the league. The bar, at the very least, is set there. It always has been. It always will be at North Carolina.

But that argument was valid at this point in the calendar in all of Davis’ four seasons to date. The Tar Heels haven’t been ranked below 19th in the AP preseason polls going into any of those seasons; only once, in 2024, did they finish in the top 25 in the final poll going into the NCAA tournament.

Thanks in part to the 2022 NCAA tournament run, their final KenPom rankings were 16th, 43rd, ninth and 31st. Under Roy Williams, the Tar Heels finished outside the KenPom top 10 only six times in 18 years, and two of those were at the very end. Which isn’t to compare Davis to Williams, unfair under most circumstances and certainly amid the epochal change in the college game, but to underline the expectations for the North Carolina program. Not that Davis needs to be reminded.

“There’s a pressure and expectation to be good this year, but also in some sense, to keep it there, if that makes sense,” Davis said. “The first year we were a rebound away from winning a national championship, then the next year we win 20 games and don’t make it to the NCAA tournament. And then the third year, we’re a top-five team pretty much the whole season, a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, won the regular-season (ACC) title. And then last year, we won 23 games and just made the NCAA tournament. And so there is a determination to get there and stay there.”

Davis knows what’s at stake. He knows what the expectations are. He knows what it’s like to live up to them, as a player and coach, and knows that the success he has experienced on the bench — late in 2022, and throughout 2024 — needs to be the norm and not the exception. All these changes in the program wouldn’t be happening if those expectations were being met. This season is either the beginning of something, or the end.

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This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 5:30 AM.

Luke DeCock

The News & Observer

Luke DeCock is a former journalist for the News & Observer.