Hubert Davis and Will Wade Are Just Cogs in a Money Machine

At the end of a week of unprecedented coaching turmoil in the Triangle, the shockwaves were still reverberating a time zone away. At the Midwest Regional of the NCAA basketball tournament in Chicago, with nary an Atlantic Coast Conference school in sight, three of the four coaches were considered potential candidates for the newly opened job at UNC-Chapel Hill. And the fourth was the one guy who would never, ever get it.

The first question for Alabama’s Nate Oats on Thursday was about UNC. Iowa State’s T.J. Otzelberger also was asked about the vacancy. Michigan’s Dusty May was not, but there were murmurings in the hallways about UNC’s potential interest in him. Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, who remains persona non grata in Chapel Hill decades after his famous feud with Dean Smith, was asked as well, but only as a joke.

“Hey, I’m from North Carolina!” said Barnes, a Hickory native, well aware of his history with the Tar Heels. He did, however, make an effort to tout his assistant coach Justin Gainey, a former N.C. State player, for the Wolfpack’s sudden vacancy after Will Wade skipped town to Louisiana State.

With Duke the overall No. 1 seed in the men’s tournament, the state continues to exert an extraordinary gravitational pull on college basketball. Last week’s developments highlighted just how much the game has changed.

Wade ditched N.C. State like a con man fleeing a town he just sold a monorail. Hubert Davis was cut loose from his dream job by the university he loved. Their departures came under divergent circumstances, just as their personalities and approaches to coaching couldn’t have been more different. 

Wade arrived and departed Raleigh as the ultimate mercenary in his schlubby track suits, building a roster from spare parts in the transfer portal. Davis emulated his predecessor, Roy Williams, not only in a plaid blazer but in trying to build around the blue-chip recruits that fueled UNC’s greatest success in previous eras.

They are united, however, as cogs in the modern college-sports machine, where everything is expendable, loyalty is worthless and there’s a price tag on anything and everyone. That didn’t happen by accident. It’s the culmination of years of intransigence from people who benefitted from a flawed system. And now the impact is landing on everyone.

That includes Barnes, who greatly appreciated the humor in the very notion of him wearing Carolina Blue. That exchange, when transcribed by the NCAA’s excellent stenographers and unavoidably stripped of nuance in the process, managed to irritate the kind of Carolina fans who like to complain about things on message boards. Not coincidentally, Barnes also had some words of warning for UNC: Just because you used to be a basketball powerhouse, it doesn’t mean things are still that way.

“The obvious problem today is there’s some fan bases that still think they have an entitlement and they think it’s going to be the same way,” Barnes said. “The game has changed totally because of NIL. I know Hubert, he was the very first player I started recruiting as a head coach back at George Mason. Incredible coach, I don’t care where he would be. Everything that’s good about the game, he is about it.”

A Strong-Ass Offer

Still, it’s hard to argue that Davis was meeting the standards the Tar Heels have set over the decades. There’s something to be said for trying to stick by those, especially if the alternative is admitting defeat and abandoning them entirely. 

Davis reluctantly hired a general manager last season, becoming one of the last major programs to outsource what are essentially contract negotiations with recruits and transfers away from the coaching staff. He seemed unable to navigate the admittedly treacherous waters of the modern college game, insisting on multiple occasions that UNC “is not a transactional program.”

Except today, everything is. Even, in the case of Wade, the coach himself.

Wade first became infamous during the FBI’s investigation into corruption in college basketball in 2019, a probe that seemed promising but fizzled into a few minor prosecutions of assistant coaches and recruiting fixers, scapegoated for the crimes of their superiors. A wiretap caught Wade discussing a “strong-ass offer” to a player, something that is the way things are done now but was still against the rules then. When he arrived at N.C. State last March, he joked that the game had finally caught up with his methods.

Here, to be sure, was a man for the moment. But the pieces of his expensively assembled roster never fit and his public demeanor rankled State fans when things turned sour. When LSU—the school that fired him when he was caught on the wiretap—showed up with a strong-ass offer, he turned tail and ran at the first opportunity.

The strength of the wolf may be in the pack and so on, but Wade was more in line with a different parable: the leopard and his spots. N.C. State bought him, he bought a roster, and someone else made a better offer. Cash is king.

Both of these changes—the coach for sale to the highest bidder, the loyalist abandoned for failing to meet standards he helped set—are symptoms of bigger problems in college athletics, which has poorly managed its transition from extracurricular activity to multi-billion dollar business.

For decades, college athletics was a simple economy. A full scholarship was considered fair payment for what athletes brought to the university, coaches and athletic directors made a decent living, and the NCAA exerted tremendous power and control over all of them. There were still recruiting and academic scandals, and the Ivy League voluntarily backed away from big-time football in the 1950s after playing a dominant role in the sport. But for the most part, the books balanced themselves.

Then the television money started to bloom, slowly at first, then exponentially, pushing at the seams of the principles of amateurism exemplified by the NCAA’s chosen verbiage of “student-athlete.” Coaches and administrators started making millions, not to mention construction firms—all that money had to go somewhere, because it couldn’t go to the athletes, so it went to adult staffers and gold-plated facilities instead. You couldn’t entice recruits with money, so you built a football facility with a lazy river, barbershop, mini-golf course, and flight simulator.

The NCAA fought a two-fisted legal battle against any player who sought a piece of the revenue they helped generate, and the first water started to trickle through the dam when the California legislature legalized what we now know as NIL in 2019. That allowed players to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness rights by not only doing advertisements and endorsements, but acting in movies, recording albums, and hosting summer camps, all of which had been prohibited under the guise of “amateurism.” 

Legislators elsewhere, fearful of losing recruits who would otherwise have played at State U., quickly followed suit. Then-Governor Roy Cooper did it in North Carolina by executive order in July 2021. It was merely the first blow against the NCAA’s strict interpretation of amateur athletics. More would soon follow, in waves.

Never mind that the Olympic movement long ago abandoned that pretense in all but name; this was the hill that the NCAA would die on. And it died. The Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Alston v. NCAA was relatively minor in scope—it allowed universities to pay athletes “cost of attendance” stipends to cover housing and books and the like—but it was written in a way that indicated the NCAA was going to lose any similar case it faced. 

Last spring, it finally chose to fold rather than fight a lawsuit from Arizona State swimmer Grant House and other athletes who argued the NCAA’s amateurism rules were an antitrust violation, essentially setting the cost of labor at $0 unilaterally. In addition to billions of dollars in back pay for former athletes, the House settlement opened the door to schools paying current athletes directly, a pool of $20.5 million per year per school in “revenue sharing.”

Had the NCAA acted more proactively earlier, this all might have proceeded in a more orderly fashion. Instead, lawsuit after lawsuit tore apart the NCAA’s old rulebook. Athletes no longer had to sit out a year when changing schools, and could do it as often as they liked. Between revenue-sharing and school-arranged NIL deals, every college athlete became a free agent open for business. Professional leagues have collective-bargaining agreements to govern these things; the NCAA, because it so badly botched its legal strategy, had no recourse but to make the best deal it could with the House plaintiffs.

Fans Still Watching

So that’s where we are now, with the NCAA begging Congress, so far unsuccessfully, for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Outgoing UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham is one of many powerbrokers who now argue publicly that collective bargaining with athletes is the best path forward, but it may take years for the rest of the college sports industrial complex to come around to that idea. 

Amid all this upheaval, college sports are probably no more broken than they ever were; players, at least, are no longer unpaid labor, and the dysfunction is out in the open instead of in the shadows. Fans may complain, but they’re still watching. Television ratings have never been higher. Fears that some of the core aspects of college fandom are being lost—watching a player develop over the course of his or her career, and building bonds with a school that endure long after graduation—have so far proven unfounded, or at least not had an impact yet.

Nevertheless, it’s jarring to see UNC conducting a coaching search outside its family for the first time in 70 years after firing a member of that family, let alone witness the utter venality of someone like Wade on full display. 

When things change in college basketball, North Carolina often feels it first, and deeply.