Giglio: Bubba Cunningham has options for UNC but he can't make the wrong hire

By Joe Giglio, WRALSportsFan

When Bubba Cunningham brought Mack Brown back to UNC, he knew it would rekindle interest in a dormant football program.

“I have to admit, it has worked out even better than I thought,” Cunningham told me in an interview after Brown led the Tar Heels to a major bowl game for the first time since 1950.

Now Cunningham has to hit another home run but this time the stakes are higher. This is the most important hire Cunningham, 58, will make in his professional career.

No pressure. The future of Carolina basketball depends on it.

Fairly or unfairly, this is how history will judge Cunningham. Not for successfully navigating the interminable academic morass with the NCAA when he was hired in 2011 until the case was closed in 2017; not for bringing Brown back in 2018 and not for plucking Courtney Banghart from the Ivy League to run the women’s program.

The first two resume items, in particular, are impressive, but when you’re the athletic director at the University of North Carolina, men’s basketball drives the bus.

And with Roy Williams’ retirement on Thursday, Cunningham finds himself at a crossroads at a time when college basketball is at a crossroads.

The game has changed and more changes are coming with Name, Image and Likeness legislation on its way. Few schools, with UNC’s ties not only to the Jordan Brand but to Michael Jordan himself, will be in better position to help their athletes than Carolina.

But Cunningham has to make the right hire here. The biggest choice Cunningham, who went to Notre Dame and worked at Ball State and Tulsa before coming to Chapel Hill, will have to make is whether to stay in the “Carolina family” or go outside of it.

Longtime UNC AD Dick Baddour made a mistake in 2000 when he felt obligated to “stay in the family” when Bill Guthridge retired and he hired former player Matt Doherty.

Williams quickly, by winning a national title in Year 2, made people forget about Doherty’s malpractice with the program. In the wrong hands, any program — even North Carolina's — can bottom out to 8-20. UNC was in a scorched-earth state when Williams got there in 2003.

Hubert Davis, an assistant for Williams since 2012, is the logical choice from the “family." Davis is a popular former player (1988-92), who had a longtime NBA career and then came back home to his alma mater. Juwan Howard’s success at Michigan (Big Ten regular-season title, No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament) suggests the same template could work for Davis.

One factor with Davis which should be noted: UNC has never hired an African-American head coach in men’s basketball, football, women’s basketball or baseball.

Davis, and UNC-Greensboro coach Wes Miller, a part of the 2005 national title team, are on Cunningham’s short list. But he owes it to Williams, the school and everyone who cares about Carolina basketball, to find the best possible coach.

Dean Smith, years after his retirement, said he would have considered a brilliant strategist like former Utah coach Rick Majerus, as a replacement for either Guthridge or Doherty. It was a shock, even all those years later, to hear that Smith would have broken out from his own coaching tree.

Unlike the football search that led to Brown (who had been lobbying behind the scenes for months for a second stint) Cunningham holds all the cards now. There isn’t a better job in college basketball.

While other schools like Duke or Syracuse will have to prove it's the program and not the hall-of-fame coach, three different coaches have won national titles at UNC. Guthridge, Smith's replacement, went to the Final Four twice in his three years as the head coach and was considered an underachiever before Doherty showed how low the bar could go.

If Mark Few, Jay Wright and Chris Holtmann are on Cunningham’s emergency list — or, yes, even Brad Stevens (although that’s another column entirely) — then Cunningham owes it to himself to call them and explore every possibility.

There’s more than one right choice for Cunningham to make but UNC can’t afford for him to make the wrong one.

His track record suggests, he will get it right. Maybe even catch lightning in a bottle again and go better than anyone, himself included, could reasonably expect.