Roy Williams retiring

Greg29fan

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Man, who would be the targets here?
It should be anybody on planet earth but it'll probably be Wes Miller from UNC-Greensboro or Hubert Davis.

Roy brought all of us Carolina honks a great deal of joy and rescued us out of the death spiral the Matt Doherty era was, but the last two years haven't been much to write home about and I think he's struggled to adapt to the new era/style of basketball. I think this is probably well-timed, outside of being April 1.
 

tims4wins

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Jul 15, 2005
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It should be anybody on planet earth but it'll probably be Wes Miller from UNC-Greensboro or Hubert Davis.

Roy brought all of us Carolina honks a great deal of joy and rescued us out of the death spiral the Matt Doherty era was, but the last two years haven't been much to write home about and I think he's struggled to adapt to the new era/style of basketball. I think this is probably well-timed, outside of being April 1.
As a Duke fan agree with all this, but surprised he didn't give it one more year to go out in a "normal" season.
 

Greg29fan

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I don't know if he'd take the call after the Indiana rumors, but given where the Celtics are at in the standings right now, and the feeling of general, I guess, malaise around the organization, if you go outside the "Carolina family" option #1 has to be to Brad.
 

RedOctober3829

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Hubert Davis and Wes Miller should be targets. A lot of the obvious targets have been mentioned. Two off the radar candidates that would shock people are Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell and Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard. Pikiell has completely turned around Rutgers, has shown he can recruit and get really good players and recruiting to Chapel Hill is a hell of a lot easier than it is to Piscataway. He does it the right way as well as you won't ever have to worry about any type of academic fraud scandal or anything of the sorts that has happened there recently. Willard has built something good at Seton Hall as well.
 

Ale Xander

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Oct 31, 2013
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I don't think there's any way they're going outside of the family. If Stack or Hubert could coach I'd say one of them, but the best candidate to me is Miller. Dark horse candidate is Jeff Lebo.

Thanks for the memories. Roy. Wish you didn't go out on such an early tourney exit.
 

reggiecleveland

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I saw Roy do clinics quite often. He seemed a genuinely nice guy. He was guy who would always go overtime taking questions, and often after a session end up moving to a corridor answering questions, until a NIKE person would break it up. He would joke with the NIKE functionary,"Look at there lanyards, these coaches paid, you go their money, let them talk hoops." I recognize this was his exit strategy and some good PR, but many of the coaches had the NIKE cops step in immediately.
 

Buck Showalter

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Hubert Davis and Wes Miller should be targets. A lot of the obvious targets have been mentioned. Two off the radar candidates that would shock people are Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell and Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard. Pikiell has completely turned around Rutgers, has shown he can recruit and get really good players and recruiting to Chapel Hill is a hell of a lot easier than it is to Piscataway. He does it the right way as well as you won't ever have to worry about any type of academic fraud scandal or anything of the sorts that has happened there recently. Willard has built something good at Seton Hall as well.
The two 'offer the radar' candidates you refer to have Long Island connections.

Coach Pike (as you well know) was successful in getting Stony Brook University to its first invite to the NCAA-tourney. This allowed him to get 'on the radar' for larger programs including Rutgers of the Big 12.

Kevin Willard of Huntington, NY (former Celtics Assistant under Pitino) is the son of Ralph Willard who coached at St. Domenic's in Oyster Bay Long Island and College of the Holy Cross. Ralph Willard also followed Rick Pitino to the NY Knicks and Kentucky.
 

Omar's Wacky Neighbor

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Leaving in a bit to the studio :)
UNC alum: check. Multiple college head coaching jobs: check. NBA asst and head coaching experience: check. Red Auerbach seal of approval: check. Only guy from his college starting five to not make the Olympic team: check.

OK, so maybe not my old Chinese food buddy John Kuester.....
 

DJnVa

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Dec 16, 2010
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(2) Seth Davis on Twitter: "North Carolina basketball coaching candidates: Hubert Davis, Wes Miller, Brad Stevens and other names to watch https://t.co/zmEXh82f4J" / Twitter

Brad Stevens, head coach, Boston Celtics. There is some chatter among UNC alums that Williams would be happy to see Stevens replace him in Chapel Hill. Stevens, however, just flatly batted away any notion of taking over at Indiana, so saying yes to North Carolina would not go over well with folks back in his native state. Taking this job would also require Stevens to bail on the Celtics before the season is over. The Celtics are mired in eighth place in the Eastern Conference playoff standings, but it’s hard to imagine that would dampen the enthusiasm of UNC fans (or the fear of the Duke ones) if North Carolina made this hire.
 

Greg29fan

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Roy beating himself up through this presser and saying he's retiring b/c he's no longer the right man for the job is pretty tough. It really makes me wish he'd stayed until he had an opportunity to go out on a higher note. The good from his tenures at Carolina and Kansas deserved to get a lot more celebrated than the tone/feeling this ended up being.
 

BaseballJones

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Let's remember that dozens and dozens of Roy's players (including most of his 2005 championship team) went through the fraud courses that earned UNC (not the athletic department...the UNIVERSITY itself, so bad was the fraud) a year of probation and nearly lost accreditation, which would have been absolutely unfathomable.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/12/accrediting-body-places-unc-probation

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/16/breaking-ncaa-finds-no-academic-fraud-unc

Long story short, they never faced NCAA punishment because aside from the *1,500* athletes who took these sham courses (including a lot of men's basketball players), non-athletes took them as well, so it didn't comprise a "special benefit" for the athletes, and thus they couldn't do anything about it.* :rolleyes:

Good riddance to Roy.


*The lesson obviously being: if you're going to commit fraud on behalf of your athletes, just make sure you do it for non-athletes, and then there's nothing the NCAA can do about it.
 

67YAZ

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Let's remember that dozens and dozens of Roy's players (including most of his 2005 championship team) went through the fraud courses that earned UNC (not the athletic department...the UNIVERSITY itself, so bad was the fraud) a year of probation and nearly lost accreditation, which would have been absolutely unfathomable.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/12/accrediting-body-places-unc-probation

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/16/breaking-ncaa-finds-no-academic-fraud-unc

Long story short, they never faced NCAA punishment because aside from the *1,500* athletes who took these sham courses (including a lot of men's basketball players), non-athletes took them as well, so it didn't comprise a "special benefit" for the athletes, and thus they couldn't do anything about it.* :rolleyes:

Good riddance to Roy.


*The lesson obviously being: if you're going to commit fraud on behalf of your athletes, just make sure you do it for non-athletes, and then there's nothing the NCAA can do about it.
This fiasco changed Higher Ed accreditation and administrative practices across the field. It was a massive failure of UNC at every level, with the athletic department deep in the mix. Outside of the institutional tolerance for sex abuse at Penn State & Michigan State, what happened at UNC is the biggest and most consequential scandal in many, many years. Lori Laughlin and Rick Pitino pale in comparison.

Roy skates because he seems like a nice, folksy kind of guy? But posters in this forum will call Kelvin Sampson “dirty” because he made too many phone calls and broke recruiting rules that aren’t rules anymore. College athletics are entirely upside down.
 
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BaseballJones

ivanvamp
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Oct 1, 2015
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Roy skated even though 226 men’s basketball players were involved in this scandal from 1999-2009 (admittedly not all his players, as he arrived in 2003), because:

(1) Roy claimed to not know what was going on, as impossible as that sounds given how prevalent this was

And

(2) the fraud involved non-athletes, so it didn’t count as a “special benefit” for athletes.

Those first two are objective facts, not up for opinion. But I also think (opinion here) that yeah it’s UNC basketball and Roy Williams and the NCAA didn’t want to punish them. Honestly the entire athletic department should have gotten the death penalty. Not just men’s basketball (football and women’s hoops were even more at fault to be honest).

Boeheim and SU forfeited games and lost scholarships and got suspended because (1) a few players got paid a few bucks to work at a YMCA (even though non-athletes got paid for the same work too, thus it should have been similar to point (2) above with UNC), (2) and because one assistant wrote a paper for Fab Melo. Which obviously should never happen but is a grain of sand compared to the desert that is what was happening at UNC.

This isn’t me complaining about Boeheim’s punishment. I am ok with them getting whacked for what happened there. It’s saying that what happened at UNC was *orders of magnitude* worse and they got.... NOTHING.

Roy may come off as some great guy but he was involved in the single worst academic fraud in collegiate athletic history. And he totally skated. So I’m sorry that I’m not on team Roy or team UNC. I used to like them. Now I can’t stand them.
 

Humphrey

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Aug 3, 2010
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Roy beating himself up through this presser and saying he's retiring b/c he's no longer the right man for the job is pretty tough. It really makes me wish he'd stayed until he had an opportunity to go out on a higher note. The good from his tenures at Carolina and Kansas deserved to get a lot more celebrated than the tone/feeling this ended up being.
Bill Self would certainly be the funniest target.
I think KU just game him an offer he can't refuse.