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There are some guys who have come through UNC who have been very difficult to dislike. They’re still really easy to pull against, don’t misunderstand. They’re just difficult to dislike.
Among them are Dante Calabria, who always seemed like a good guy, Shammond Williams, who one year came over and hung out with the Cameron Crazies before a Duke-UNC game and said how they were a lot of fun and how much he liked them, and Eric Montross, who did the standard visit-the-kids-in-the-hospital thing and became deeply attached to a terminally ill boy to the point where it affected his play.
They’re, well, over there, but they're not all bad and some are quite likable. Among that select company is Hubert Davis, UNC’s new coach.
We have always thought well of him. Dean Smith said gave him a scholarship largely because he was Walter Davis’s nephew who had some small potential but was never expected to become a major factor, much less an NBA player. But Davis did those things and did so while always, always giving the sense that he is a very decent man.
His hiring to replace Roy Williams has generally gone over welll.
LeVelle Moton of NCCU had great things to say about him. The UNC family was positive too. The media was supportive of the hire also and even social media was broadly supportive, no mean task these days.
You really couldn’t ask for a much better honeymoon or a much better start to the post-Williams era.
Watching all of this transpire from afar was former Williams player Larry Drew II, and Drew had quite a bit to say about his former coach on Twitter.
Most of it has been taken down but over the last couple of days, we think, Drew posted some amazingly harsh stuff about Williams and UNC. The only thing still up is a Tweet that says “Roy Williams was the greatest recruiter to front as a coach of all time.“
But he also said quite a bit more, including a suggestion that he had a herniated disk and that UNC had refused to let him get an X-Ray. He complained about Kendall Marshall, who took his job, saying that while Williams and his staff tried to force him to be Ty Lawson II, he let Marshall do whatever he wanted. He also said that Williams had been deceptive when he visited the family and even complained that he had asked not to lift too much as a freshman but was required to anyway.
Most of it, as we said, has been taken down and so what we say here is from memory, but you can still see some of the reactions to his angry tweets on his feed and at least two sites noticed too, posting the links at the bottom.
Obviously we have no idea what his experience at UNC was and can’t comment on that, as he rightly noted in his tweet storm. But while no one outside the UNC bubble knows exactly what happened, we can say this: he was never one of those UNC guys who was likable and he’s still not.