Roy Williams - UNC Men's Basketball Coach Retires
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... waiting to see if April Fool's is involved before responding.
Apparently it's real... or one of the most well coordinated April Fools jokes I've seen. It would make sense why there has been a mini exodus of players from UNC
https://twitter.com/UNC_Basketball/status/1377626749903761426
https://goheels.com/news/2021/4/1/mens-basketball-test-release.aspx
But wow is UNC dumb for choosing to announce this today
This would be an all-time April Fools joke if it was only that. Or if UNC announces today that they have come to terms with Michael Jordan to come back as head coach. That might be even better.
Or if UNC announces today that they have come to terms with Michael Jordan to come back as head coach. That might be even better.
Given the attention Penny, Howard, and Ewing are getting this spring, that is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Not quite as dumb as Ford originally having the reveal for their new bronco on OJ's birthday.
But wow is UNC dumb for choosing to announce this today
What does it matter, really?
Juwan Howard expected to be announced as the new UNC coach later toady.
Who are you calling a toady, buddy?
+1
oops!
What's protocol on this? Can I edit it or now that I've been called out is it proper manners to leave it be so that your reply holds up?
Decorum dictates that the typo stand.
What Tomer said! But if you do edit, leave a note that says you edited...
Rumors swirling around Eric Montross.
April Fools aside, the obvious choice here would be Jerry Stackhouse if they want to go the Juwan Howard, Patrick Ewing, Penny Hardaway route.
Hopefully true. And hopefully their program falls into ruin for the foreseeable future after all the stuff they have gotten away with.
i'd go the other way - the longer a clearly past-prime coach sticks around a loathsome program, the better. i'm hoping they're still wheeling out a drooling mike kwerjsawkcki well into the 2030s.
Yeah, that's why I don't mind Izzo sticking around a bit. He's lost a step and a couple years of them struggling to make the tourney will do wonders for UM.
Nah, I'd be fine with Izzo leaving. Let's not forget that they just recently won three straight Big Ten titles.
MSU is not UNC or Duke. I don't expect their next coach to do as well as Izzo.
Perhaps, but I think he's been trending down a bit. I agree MSU isn't UNC or Duke but they are still a pretty high-level program and a younger guy with more forward-thinking coaching could absolutely take off there. Izzo screaming at and grabbing players for the next couple of years isn't the worst thing to tarnish their image a bit.
I don't know that Duke is really Duke. The guy before K (Bill Foster) had some success (1978 finals, trips to the NCAA when it was <=40 teams), but Foster for some reason left for the mighty South Carolina job. Obviously a lot has changed in the last 40 years, but nobody knows how much their current state is K and how much of it is Duke.
Duke also went to the Final Four a couple of times in the 1960s. They've been a strong program for most of the last 60 years.
Beyond that, they're media darlings. They'll get their pick of the litter. An old rumor is that Brad Stevens wants to succeed K.
I agree with this take. Duke won't be awful without Coach K. I think there's a pretty good chance they take a step or two back from being D-U-K-E.
I feel the same way about Syracuse and MSU for that matter. Is it the larger than life coach or the program.
I would love to believe that Izzo is trending down, but we need more than one season of evidence of that. Even this year they had a mini-turnaround in the final month of the season.
His obit has been written before. I’m not ready to say he’s lost a step
Shaka Smart should have waited 2 weeks to leave Texas.
LOL!!! He would be an awesome head coach at UNC...
Quick trivia question: name the two UNC coaches that bridged the Dean Smith and Roy Williams eras.
Matt Doherty was one right
Yes. And Guthridge.
I've always thought of Guthridge as the last three years of the Dean Smith era. He was supposed to be some sort of placeholder, I guess, until the Right Guy was found.
I had the misfortune of attending Guthridge's last game as head coach.
The reason I asked that question is because I totally forgot about the Guthridge years. I remembered the ill-fated Doherty stretch. Like you, maybe I just remember Guthridge's tenure as a continuation of Dean Smith.
He went to 2 Final Fours!!
Sounds like poaching season
It's unlikely they'd be interested in him or him in UNC, but Beilein to UNC would be terrifying.
I'm ambivalent about Williams overall. Clearly a good coach but also a guy who always felt a bit slimy. Still better than Coach K on that front. Will be interested if we see some roster turnover that affects UM.
Terrifying?? They expect McDonalds AA at UNC not some unknown from Indiana. JB’s unique recruiting quirks wouldn’t last at UNC. He is a terrible fit.
Agree with this, and also this issue: Williams is retiring because he's slowing down at 70. John Beilein is 68.
Yeah, but Beilein can pull in a certain degree of top-level recruit that UNC would be happy with. We sleep on it now but Beilein was putting guys into the NBA at a good clip; not quite UNC level but still pretty good.
The age thing is the bigger issue, honestly. UNC can cheat to get guys because they get away with it, but if Beilein has shown he can make an elite team with NBA-level guys out of players other schools pass on. In the end fans just want to see a winner and don't care how they get there.
Beilein produced NBA players, but he didn't really land blue-chip recruits. His entire tenure here people were griping about recruiting.
Realistically, they're not going to do much better than Williams, who won three national titles in 15 years.
I was at Kansas when Roy was there. I had some insight into the men's basketball team, because I knew several of the women's players. Roy treated people well as far as I know. His players were not necessarily great students (I'm being kind putting it like that), but they weren't bad citizens. And while that may seem like a low bar, they could likely have murdered people and still been embraced by the KU fanbase.
I don't think Roy was anywhere near as dirty as, say, Will Wade. But his programs weren't terribly clean either. I don't mean this as an apology, but I think he came from an era when cash handshakes and cutting academic corners were par for the course. People forget that John Wooden was a massive cheater by John Beilein standards.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that Roy was not the worst and not the best.
These days that's about as good as you can ask for in this sport with that high profile of a job.
People forget that John Wooden was a massive cheater by John Beilein standards.
Not just by John Beilein standards. By any standards.
Yes, that's a fair correction!
How cool would it have been if Kareem went to Michigan?
"People forget that John Wooden was a massive cheater by John Beilein standards."
The real Wizard of Westwood was Sam Gilbert.
Makes sense.
I thought Williams seemed like a nicer guy than Coach K or Izzo in terms of player interactions; the latter seem like absolute monsters to be around. I guess I conflate a bit how easy it was for Bill Self to take over at Kansas and all the stuff that's come out from that regime and assume that the groundwork was laid by Williams. And the academic fraud issues they had with the basketball team at UNC were during his tenure and that stuck with me. But by college basketball standards he's probably not all that bad; of the "great" coaches of this era he sounds cleaner than your Calipari's or Coach Ks.
Maybe this is a hot take, but I always thought Roy Williams was overrated as a coach in the last handful of years. The only way he ever had success was when his 5 stars stayed for 4 years. He always seemed to underachieve with the talent he had in recent years
9 Final Fours, 3 national championships.
I think when you have talent like he does you can't ever overachieve. It's an impossible bar to reach.
There are better tactical coaches out there, but he rebuilt Carolina very, very quickly after the Doherty debacle and achieved quite a bit of success. Even in the last 5 years he played in one national title game and won one.
Didn't he make 2 title games the last 5 yrs? They lost to Nova in the title game the year before he won his 3rd title
Like him or not, Good Ol’ Boy Roy knew how to play the game at both Kansas and UNC. Whether it was money or keeping players eligible (See: UNC Academic Scandal), Roy kept his teams in the top ten for decades. Personally, I always thought he was an oily, smiling piece of shit.
Facts!! He was Eddie Haskell
All in all, UNC got what it wanted, Roy got what he wanted, and all parties can move on. This was probably one of the more successful "return to mama when she calls" type of coaching hires in recent NCAA history.