Butch Davis has been fired as head football coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels. The man who righted the ship at the University of Miami football and put the program back on the map at the turn of the century, is now the fall guy in Chapel Hill.
What a difference a decade makes.
Davis’ arrival at UNC in 2006 versus his first head coaching gig at UM in 1995 couldn’t have been more different. A former defensive coordinator under Jimmy Johnson at ‘The U’, Davis followed his mentor to Dallas, won a few Super Bowls with the Cowboys and returned to Coral Gables after Dennis Erickson has let his Canes run amok.
Pell Grant fraud and lack of institutional control landed Miami on probation. Scholarship losses hit UM hard and the first three years of Davis’ tenure at ‘The U’ resulted in a 22-12 run; impossible to fathom after the success Miami had seen the previous decade.
Davis led the Canes to an 11-1 season in 2000, should’ve earned a title game berth, smoked Florida in the Sugar Bowl, ended the season No. 2 and set the stage for a national championship the following season. The Canes won 34-straight games between 2000-2002 and it was Davis’ players which made that turnaround a reality.
Upon arriving in Chapel Hill in November 2006, a completely different situation. North Carolina was squeaky clean, but atrocious on the field, in the midst of a 3-9 season, having gone 5-6 the year before.
The Tar Heels went 4-8 in 2007, but a solid recruiting haul proved that Davis could still recruit and would find a way to bring talent to North Carolina. From there, three straight 8-5 seasons -though his last could’ve been something special had suspensions not stripped UNC of a boatload of talent.
North Carolina had nine players selected in this year’s NFL Draft and could’ve had more, had scandal not sent players’ stock plummeting. Even those drafted should’ve gone higher.
Defensive tackle Marvin Austin looked like a sure first-round pick but went mid-second after a season of the off the field issues. Linebacker Quan Sturdivant slipped all the way to the sixth round while cornerback Kendric Burney and safety Denuta Williams went undrafted.
Defensive end Robert Quinn was the Heels lone first-rounder off a team loaded with first round talent. A team with a dozen players suspended for last year’s season opener against LSU, falling one play short of a miraculous comeback, down 30-10 entering the fourth quarter and a team much better than the 8-5 record that resulted from all the lost talent … but again, talent at what price?
A colleague emailed me early today, ripping Davis and insinuating that based on what just happened at North Carolina, how could Butch not run a dirty program at Miami in the mid- to late-90s. Simple answer; the NCAA was completely up UM’s ass when Davis took over.
No way a team already on probation – a team the nation hated and a program Sports Illustrated called to shut its doors – could do anything but walk the straight and narrow at that time. Miami had received the harshest penalty since SMU’s death penalty and Davis was hired to clean things up. Fans may have applied pressure to win, but the administration’s goal was to right the ship.
Fast forward to half a decade ago in Chapel Hill and again, the complete opposite situation; a squeaky clean program hell bent on winning and an array of rich, entitled, wanting-to-be-a-part-of-the-team boosters ready to open their checkbooks to make this happen. Davis was a big-name hire for the program and based on his previous collegiate success (and Miami ties), Tar Heel nation expected results.
To get a football program like North Carolina off the ground and to the next level, it wound up taking a little bit of corner cutting. While Davis kept a lot of the best local talent home, his name and reputation allowed him to cherry-pick kids from all over the country. UNC doesn’t have the tradition of UM and Chapel Hill doesn’t have the abundance of high school talent South Florida does.
In other words, where hometown guys like Santana Moss wound up in Coral Gables on a track scholarship or Joaquin Gonzalez for grades, Davis wasn’t going to get breaks like that when building up the Tar Heels like he rebuilt the Canes.
Are corners cut in the college game? Sure. Every program on some level has done something just like every citizen has. Question is are we talking about rolling a stop sign and going five miles per hour over the limit, or is the crime embezzlement and fraud?
They say that character is what we do when no one is watching. While Davis was at Miami, taking his first shot as a head coach, everybody was watching and he was forced to run a tight ship. While at North Carolina, nobody was watching the squeaky-clean program and with ten years head coaching experience under his belt (including four in the shady NFL), Davis definitely wasn’t the man he was when entering the coaching game and somewhat forced to do right.
How much Davis directly had to do with the wrongdoing is up for debate, but he hired guys like John Blake and turned a blind eye on some level, so as a CEO of a program, that’s where the buck stops.
On some level Davis is the scapegoat, with the Tar Heels’ top brass looking towards Columbus and seeing Ohio State disassociating itself with former head coach Jim Tressel, in effort to self-police and to get the NCAA to go easy with punishment. That said, many expect North Carolina to get crushed harder than Southern California, who lost thirty scholarships and earned a one-year bowl ban for recent wrongdoings.
In the end, winning cannot supersede doing the right thing and the Davis-led Heels have been hit with nine major violations, including providing players with “improper benefits” and “academic improprieties”.
Another black eye for the college game and a sad ending for Davis, who looked like he’d found a good home in Chapel Hill. His success at Miami – and the credit he earned for rebuilding the right way – feel like a lifetime ago. A failed stint at Cleveland (24-35 overall) and now this black eye earned at North Carolina.
Davis will get another chance somewhere, but you have to believe it won’t be as prestigious as his last three stops and regarding new Miami head coach Al Golden and staff in Coral Gables, another coaching casualty for them to take note of and yet one more reason to play by the rules while rebuilding ‘The U’.