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Can it be 20 years since Roy Williams came back to save Carolina basketball?
On August 1, 2003, Carolina’s new head coach was celebrating his 53rd birthday while still trying to get used to the job he had taken after turning it down three years earlier.
Dean Smith told his protégé when Bill Guthridge retired in 2000 that “we want you.” After Roy decided to stay at Kansas and the Matt Doherty experiment blew up, Smith said to Williams that this time “we NEED you.”
Williams returned to his alma amidst a dark period in Carolina athletics. While coaching the Jayhawks to four Final Fours in 15 seasons, he watched from afar as John Swofford moved from athletic director to ACC Commissioner, Smith retired before the start of the 1997-98 season and Mack Brown left a fourth-ranked football program for a big pay raise at Texas.
Although Williams got the Tar Heels back to the NCAA tournament after a two-year absence, and won his first national championship in his second season, the other marquee programs at UNC were falling apart.
Swofford was succeeded by Dick Baddour, who promoted lifetime assistant Carl Torbush to replace Brown. That lasted three seasons before Baddour fired him, tried to hire Frank Beamer away from Virginia Tech and when that did not pan out went with former Tar Heel and favorite John Bunting, a great guy with no D-I coaching experience.
Bunting was told late in the 2006 season that he would not return, and the Board of Trustees went out and hired big name Butch Davis, who was collecting a few million bucks after getting fired from the Cleveland Browns while doing TV work.
Under Davis, Carolina fell into the infamous academic-athletic scandal that lasted long after Chancellor Holden Thorp fired the embattled football coach and took Baddour’s resignation — two years after Williams won his second Natty and the school’s fifth in 2009 behind Tyler Hansbrough and his crew. It would be until the very day another NCAA banner was unfurled in 2017 that UNC got off with no violations but felt the lingering effects for years.
By then, Bubba Cunningham was in his fifth year as the new athletic director and Larry Fedora got off to a great start with his football program before it sputtered, Mack Brown 2.0 replaced him and order seemed to be restored.
Before Ol’ Roy turned 70, his 2020 team was out of contention for an NCAA bid when COVID canceled the Big Dance. Williams coached one more season and looked drained the day he announced his retirement. Maybe the encroaching transfer portal and NIL hastened his exit.
After 18 years, a Hall of Fame induction and surpassing 900 career wins, Williams’ reason for returning still resonated. “I couldn’t say no to Coach Smith a second time,” he said. Aren’t we grateful that he didn’t!
Featured image via Todd Melet
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We were certainly fortunate that Coach Williams came home, and fortunate there was a Dean Smith to ask him to do it.
I’m slightly biased, but no matter how you argue over who is the greatest BB coach of all time, can anyone argue against the greatest pair being Smith and Williams?