When Roy Williams retired as head coach in North Carolina last week after 33 seasons, there was widespread speculation about who would fill the shoes of a man who won three NCAA championships at one of the top programs in the state.
That speculation ended Monday, hours before the national championship game, when the school named Hubert Davis, 50, as Williams’ successor. Davis, who led the Tar Heels to the 1991 Final Four and recently served as Williams’ co-head coach, becomes the first black head coach in the program’s history.
Hubert Davis: ‘I’m 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗱, 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗸𝗳𝘂𝗹, 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 to be your new men’s basketball coach for the University of North Carolina.’#CarolinaFamilie pic.twitter.com/Lev1CwyTQD
– Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) 5 April 2021
Davis was to be formally unveiled at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
“I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to lead this program,” Davis said in a statement.
‘I love this University. I played here, I got my degree here, I fell in love with my wife here, I got married here. “I moved here after retiring from the NBA and raising my family here,” he added. “I’m proud to lead this team, and I can not wait for everything that comes after that.”
Several teams in the Big 12 were also busy with the coaching wagon. Oklahoma on Friday named former Loyola-Chicago coach Porter Moser 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 to the NCAA Tournament. Moser, 52, left 188-140 (.573) in 10 seasons at Loyola and led the Ramblers on a surprising path to the Final Four in 2018, with the help of sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, and then a round of 16 appearance this season. .
The Moser news comes on the same day that Kansas signed Bill himself for a lifetime contract and a day after Texas hired Chris Beard from Big 12 rival Texas Tech.
Himself won a championship in 2008, but Kansas was recently under the NCAA’s investigation in the wake of the federal government’s investigation into corruption in university basketball. Self’s contract contains a clause that the university will not dismiss him for the violation “due to violations related to conduct that occurred on or before the date of full implementation of this agreement.”
Beard led Texas Tech to the 2019 championship game, where the Red Raiders lost to Virginia. He began his career as a graduate assistant in Texas.
Texas Tech has allowed several players to enter the transfer portal, and it is possible that some of them may follow Beard to Texas.
In the Great East, Marquette replaced the fired Steve Wojciechowski with Shaka Smart, who grew up in Madison, Wis, and has ties to the area. In six seasons in Texas, Smart failed to win an NCAA tournament, and this year was the no. 3-seeded Longhorns stunned in the first round by 14-seeded Abilene Christian.
At DePaul, the school replaces Dave Leitao with Tony Stubblefield, a longtime head coach in Oregon. The Big East will now have six black head coaches among 11 men’s basketball teams.
Gonzaga wants to become the first men’s team to finish unbeaten since Bob Knight’s Indiana club 32-0 on its way to the 1976 national championships. The Bulldogs are also seeking their first NCAA title, though they have had very deep tournaments. They lost the title game in 2017 to a team in North Carolina, coached by Roy Williams, who announced his retirement on Friday and had three titles in his career.
Coach Scott Drew and Baylor are also seeking the first national championship of their program. The Bears appear for the first time since 1948 in the title game.
“Incredibly, we worked hard through this one-season battle, but we stayed together,” guard Jalen Suggs, a first-year student at Gonzaga, said in a television interview after winning the game late Saturday in a 93-90 victory over UCLA. night.
“I can not put this one into words, and make dreams come true and now we are getting ready for Baylor,” Suggs said. “They’re a tough team.”
Even though Gonzaga has not lost to Brigham Young since February 22, 2020, the Bears have history on their side. This is only the fifth time since the Associated Press Top 25 pre-season poll began in the early 1960s that the teams have been at No. 1 (Gonzaga) and no. 2 (Baylor) meet in the title race. Each of the previous four games was won by the team that finished 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 up 56 points in the paint against UCLA, and the Bears will need an answer for that. Baylor is led by experienced guards and wingers, and its forwards Mark Vital and Flo Thamba are solid if not spectacular.
Baylor is led by an American junior guard, Jared Butler, who had 17 points in the Houston semifinals, and another junior guard, Davion Mitchell, who dished out 12 assistants with 11 points when the Bears won, 78- 59. After last year’s tournament was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, both Butler and senior guard MaCio Teague tested the NBA draft water, but chose to take another chance on the title.
“It was one of my goals, and I know some of my teammates’ goals, just to leave a legacy with Baylor and create Baylor as a blue blood,” Butler said.
Larry Bird’s Indiana State team was 33-0 in the 1979 game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State.
In the state of Michigan was not only Johnson, then a sophomore, but also Greg Kelser, a 6-foot-7 forward who was later selected in the first round of the NBA draft.
“We felt our zone could affect them,” Johnson said before the semifinals on CBS. “We teamed Larry with every double team and we were able to win,” 75-64.
During his junior season, Bird averaged 28.6 points, 14.9 rebounds and 5.5 assists during a game after scoring 30 points as a sophomore and nearly 33 as a freshman. In the national semifinal against DePaul, he made 16 of 19 field goal attempts and had 16 rebounds and nine assists.
Johnson, like many others in the basketball world, was hoping for a Gonzaga-Baylor final that would be in the Final Four.
“Gonzaga are such a well-balanced team, they can shoot from the outside, they got good inside players,” he said. ‘And that’s what we’re saying to Baylor,’ they were dominant inside as well as outside.
“The top two teams in college basketball were Baylor and Gonzaga all season.”
Jalen Suggs is expected to be among the top three picks in the draft this year on July 29th.
Only one player in the last decade has won an NCAA Championship and become first place: Anthony Davis, Kentucky, in 2012.
Oklahoma State first-grader Cade Cunningham and first-year 7-year-old Evan Mobley are expected to be among the top picks, along with Suggs, with plenty of shocks pushing Cunningham to No. 1.
But Brian Sandifer, the director of the Grassroots Sizzle program for which Suggs played, believes the Minnesota-born, 6-foot-4, deserves in part to be the best choice because of his history of winning. As a quarterback for the Minnehaha Academy, Suggs’ team beat them 25-1 and appeared in two state championships and won one. He was recruited by Ohio State and Notre Dame to play football, among others.
“Jalen Suggs is the best player in the draft, period,” Sandifer said in a telephone interview. ‘I have never wavered from that. If you look at how they play and do the resume checks on all the kids, Jalen Suggs has won football, basketball, whatever, at every level he has played. ”