NCAA Football

Now That They’ve Cleaned House, We Wonder: How Isn’t UNC Football Better?

With the start of preseason camp approaching, UNC football is in flux. They finally fired Butch Davis, so they’re without a (permanent) coach – Everett Withers, who previously served as defensive coordinator, got the job on an interim basis. And the man who hired Davis will be different from the one who brought him in, because athletic director Dick Baddour stepped down. Getting rid of Davis was probably necessary (though it happened way, way late), due to the sheer scope of potential improprieties surrounding the program. And really, it’s not as if his firing interrupts that much on-field success.

Davis coached four years at Carolina. His first season, he went 4-8, and he followed that up with three 8-5 campaigns in a row. Not bad, but not dazzling – especially for the guy who laid the groundwork for one of the all-time college football juggernauts at Miami. But to us, the most amazing thing isn’t that Davis failed to come close to duplicating his Miami success – it’s that those back-to-back-to-back 8-5s represented the greatest success North Carolina football had known in a decade.

Check the records: Davis’ predecessor, John Bunting, Davis’ predecessor, went 8-5 his first year. In five more seasons, he never finished above .500. Before Bunting was Carl Torbush, whose tenure produced similarly diminishing returns. Not since Mack Brown’s 1996 and 1997 teams (Torbush coached the bowl game in ’97 after Brown bolted for Texas) produced back-to-back top 10 finishes has UNC football been anywhere near the nation’s elite.

This shouldn’t be. North Carolina’s a fine ACC school, a major state school, with all the resources in the world, and by all accounts a gorgeous campus. And there’s some football history at the school, too (Lawrence Taylor, anyone?). As for a recruiting base: check out Rivals’ list of the top 250 high school prospects for the class of 2012. Not all these prospects will pan out, but it’s a good bet many of them will. By our count, no fewer than nine of these 250 players are from North Carolina itself, to say nothing of the main other states North Carolina would generally recruit (Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, among others). The talent base is more than adequate to build a top program.

NEXT: Sure, there are obstacles…but not enough for North Carolina to have an excuse.

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