A storm surrounded UNC’s Hubert Davis a year ago. He made it out to the other side

The most surprising thing was not necessarily what some disgruntled North Carolina supporters started to say about a year ago, but how quickly the discourse began. It was as though the Tar Heels’ March run of 2022 had never happened; as if Hubert Davis, then in his second season as UNC’s head coach, had forgotten how to coach. Or maybe, according to those critics, he never knew how.

Around this time a year ago, Davis found himself at the center of a storm. Never mind that he’d grown up loving UNC, from the days when his uncle, Walter, had been a UNC All-American. Never mind that he’d overcome long odds not only to earn a scholarship at UNC, but to become a starter and an All-ACC player.

Never mind that, throughout his decade-long career in the NBA, he’d made his home in Chapel Hill; or that he surrendered a lucrative broadcasting career to become an assistant coach for the Tar Heels, and ran UNC’s junior varsity team in his earliest years. Never mind, most of all, that during his first season as a head coach Davis led UNC to the national championship game.

Never mind all of that, for a year ago Davis’ critics howled. And loudly enough that his staff heard it.

“For a guy who just coached in the national championship game in his first year ... it just flipped so quickly,” said Brad Frederick, the UNC assistant coach who has worked with Davis for the past 11 years — the first eight of those alongside Davis on Roy Williams’ staff. “So I think all of us as a staff were a little shocked at how quickly some segments of people turned against him.”

If Davis heard the noise or felt the angst, he didn’t acknowledge it, Frederick said. During an interview Wednesday outside of the Tar Heels’ locker room, where they were preparing to practice before their NCAA Tournament West Regional semifinal against Alabama on Thursday, Frederick described Davis the same way he might Williams. They’re both, he said, “anti phone.”

“And so a lot of noise is blocked out,” said Frederick.

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Hubert Davis focuses on ‘what’s real’

Indeed, Davis has made a habit during his first three seasons as UNC’s head coach of deflecting questions that require observations or thoughts beyond those about his team, or players. He claimed recently, for instance, that he was unaware that Clemson had sued the ACC. He is not the best person to ask about any bigger-picture issue affecting college athletics these days.

One reporter here on Wednesday asked him to what degree he’d followed Caleb Love, who transferred from UNC to Arizona and this season became the Pac-12 Player of the Year. Love and the Wildcats would await the Tar Heels in the next round if both teams win Thursday night.

Those who’ve been around Davis for any length of time could predict his response, and then it came, as expected: “My concern is the University of North Carolina,” he said. “So the only thing that I have on my mind is our players, our program, our university.”

(Davis added that he was “very, very happy” for Love.)

The answer spoke to an approach that, for Davis, has become something of a mantra: the need to block out the noise. To focus on “what’s real,” as he likes to say, among his players and also during his exchanges with the media. And what’s real, now, is this: After perhaps the most challenging year of his professional life, he has UNC back in a regional semifinal. He has the Tar Heels as a No. 1 seed, two victories away from the Final Four. Back to where they’ve so often been.

There was hardly any guarantee, this time a year ago, that such a turnaround would happen. There was only the lingering disappointment of a season gone awry — that “we just couldn’t make it work,” as Frederick put it — and the urgency to fix it.

‘We got a new team’

UNC’s roster overhaul began almost immediately. Davis and his staff met not long after last season ended and made a list of problem areas, and potential solutions to address those deficiencies through additions via the transfer portal. The perimeter shooting woes were obvious enough, with the Tar Heels ranking among the worst 3-point shooting teams in the country. And so Davis and his assistants prioritized recruiting Cormac Ryan, the transfer from Notre Dame.

The Tar Heels lacked some of those intangible qualities a season ago, too, that have defined some of their best teams over the years. A toughness or an edge; a desire to defend as strong as the desire to score. The coaching staff came to view Harrison Ingram, who entered the portal after two years at Stanford, as a potential solution to some of those shortcomings. Jae’Lyn Withers, the transfer from Louisville, provided elements of what had been missing, too.

As Davis and his staff learned throughout that long 2022-23 season, though, it’s one thing to have pieces. Everyone thought the pieces were there when UNC entered that season ranked No. 1, with most everyone back from a team that led Kansas by 15 points at halftime of the national championship game. It is another thing, it turned out, for those pieces to blend.

Armando Bacot, the fifth-year forward who arrived at UNC in 2019, has been around long enough to have experienced just about everything during his college years. He was on the team that played what turned out to be the final game of the ACC Tournament, before its cancelation due to the pandemic in 2020. He was on Roy Williams’ final team, the next year.

And then on Davis’ first. He became a national face, of sorts, of college athlete empowerment and entrepreneurship after name, image and likeness rights became reality. He experienced the high of most of that postseason run in 2022, the crushing end of the defeat against Kansas and then the frustration that defined last season. And then his final season approached.

Bacot wasn’t sure what to expect. UNC’s performance during a preseason scrimmage against FAU, though, left him with hope. Little by little, he found himself believing again. As Bacot put it with excitement on Wednesday, “we got a new team” after the disappointment of a year ago.

“We got a bunch of amazing transfers,” he said, “and I think we all just meshed so well, that it really worked out. There was just a new sense of, like, happiness in the building. It was super refreshing.”

“This is the first team,” Bacot continued, “where Coach Davis recruited all of the players. Where it’s fully all of his guys.”

Out the other side

And what, exactly, is a Hubert Davis kind of guy?

“Definitely a toughness to us,” Bacot said. “I really can’t point to one person on this team that isn’t tough. ... And I mean, it’s just worked out. And we listen. I think that’s an underrated part of being a great team, is just listening.”

One of Davis’ most repeated messages is about the noise. Blocking it out.

Finding a way, somehow, to ignore it in a time when it’s more prevalent than ever — all over social media and waiting to be absorbed, and heard, with the scroll of an app or the touch of a screen. That noise can be all-consuming. It can dominate head space and create narratives that are only loosely tethered to reality, like the ones that spread through UNC Fan Twitter a year ago, where a great number of spoiled supporters acted as if they’d never before encountered adversity.

Davis had. Last year was not all that challenging, perhaps, compared to moments of real struggle. He has talked about some of those openly, like losing his mother during his college years, or fighting his way to earn a chance to play at UNC, and proving himself to Dean Smith as a teenager decades ago. Davis has talked, too, about his faith and his belief.

After the Tar Heels’ victory against Michigan State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, last Saturday in Charlotte, Davis reacted in a way that Frederick hadn’t often seen. Davis is an emotional man, who sometimes wears those emotions freely, but several days later the scene was still fresh in Frederick’s mind.

“Coach talks about desperately wanting these guys to have those same experiences” that Davis had at UNC, Frederick said — the ACC championships and the deep tournament runs. Davis reinforced his desire for Bacot and RJ Davis to experience those highs during off-season meetings with them, and it has been a regular part of their conversations throughout the season, too.

And so, undoubtedly, that was part of the catharsis after Michigan State. The Tar Heels were taking another step. They’d made it to the second weekend of the tournament. They were experiencing a journey like some of those Davis experienced, a long time ago. But also, too, it was another moment of proving. A year ago Davis found himself engulfed in a storm. He made it out to the other side.