Butch Davis Could Have Been Pete Carroll

Will this be Butch Davis' last year at UNC?

As we head into another season of college football, I can't help but write about one of my favorite coaches - Butch Davis. Now at North Carolina, Davis has made North Carolina football relevant. Last year I was convinced he was going to take the Tar Heels to a BCS Bowl Game with the ridiculous talent assembled on the defensive side of the ball. But a scandal involving sports agents and impermissible benefits caused 13 North Carolina players to either be suspended for part of the season or to be ruled permanently ineligible. Three players that were supposed to contribute did not play a down of football because of the scandal, including first-round pick Robert Quinn, and second-rounders Greg Little and Marvin Austin. Star cornerback Kendric Burney was suspended for six games and fellow star safety Deunta Williams was suspended for four games.

In the 2011 NFL Draft, the Tar Heels had nine players drafted, the most out of the ACC. The Tar Heels had four defensive players taken in the first four rounds, and then another player, linebacker Quan Sturdivant taken in the sixth round. They were built for a title run in 2010, but that dream dismantled before it could even take shape. Butch was just making the program a national contender until the scandal broke out. It was bad for college football, the ACC, North Carolina, but most of all for Davis.

Davis is credited, as he should be, for building a Miami powerhouse that from 2000-2002 went 35-2, including a national championship that he did not get to celebrate in because he was no longer the Miami coach. I believe his biggest mistake came in leaving a Miami program after a successful 2000 season because he had so painstakingly built up Miami from some very serious probationary sanctions. Very few people could recruit and find talent like Davis, and the evidence is in what he did while at Miami where he was responsible for recruiting a stable of first-round picks.

For a man so well respected in his profession, the truth is that Davis, now entering his 11th season as a college head coach, has just one outright Big East title and one BCS Bowl victory under his belt. Had he not left Miami after 2000, he surely would have been the Pete Carroll of the east. He would have won the title in place of Larry Coker in 2001, and I am convinced that a Davis-coached Hurricane team would have defeated Ohio State in the 2003 BCS Championship Game. Then there's no telling where the Hurricanes would have gone with where Davis put the program. Let me put it this way, Davis was such a good recruiter and coach that even Larry Coker was able to win a national title, appear in another national title game, and win the Orange Bowl in succession in his first three years. In Coker's last three years, the Hurricanes went 9-3, 9-3, and 7-6. No knock against Coker, who I think was a very good offensive coordinator. He was the man he was supposed to be in his first three years, but when Davis' players were gone, you could see that Coker was not the recruiter or talent evaluator that Davis was.

Plus, where was Coker's next coaching job? At a totally new program in the FCS, or I-AA for those of you more familiar with that classification, for the University of Texas at San Antonio Roadrunners whose inaugural season will be this year. I think Coker is more suited for this kind of job at this point in his career. But all of the "what-ifs" are irrelevant.

The fact is that Davis left Miami to become head coach of the Cleveland Browns (seriously?) where he never won more than nine games in a season and made one playoff appearance in a little more than 3 1/2 seasons. By the time he resigned midseason in 2004, he had gone a dismal 24-35, including a loss in the playoffs. He resurfaced in the college ranks in 2007 with North Carolina, and after an understandable 4-8 rebuilding year in his first season, Davis has managed to make the Tar Heel football brand respectable once again. But in his last three seasons the Tar Heels have remained stagnant, going 8-5 each year. Last year seemed like the breakout year, but the scandal left his team in pieces and Davis' job on the line.

Davis is one of my favorite coaches because he can recruit and evaluate talent unlike any other coach. He's shown he is capable of taking a program from the depths of probation to the very top of college football like he did with Miami, and that he can even take a school like North Carolina and stock it with NFL talent. But many times careers are built on the right timing. Just look at Coker and Davis. Coker can wear a national title ring, and Davis can wear a Big East conference title ring. In some instances Davis is to blame for possibly making the wrong career choice, and at other times he's been blindsided by scandal. Now Davis may end up out of a job if he is found to have been negligent in the sports-agent scandal, and pull North Carolina into its own dark probationary period. He may never realize the full potential of what he has built at North Carolina, and it wouldn't surprise me if he thinks, as Yogi Berra once said, "It's deja vu all over again."