North Carolina extending Hubert Davis' contract a genuinely baffling move

The North Carolina Tar Heels extended the contract of head coach Hubert Davis on Tuesday, locking their former player in to run the show until at least 2030, according to Brendan Marks of The Athletic.

Davis' new contract will pay him a base salary of $1.25 million, a substantial jump from his initial $400,000 per year contract. It also includes $1.7 million in supplemental income each year, a number that climbs by $100,000 per year.

According to The Athletic, the contract was agreed to after last season and signed in December, but that doesn't make it any less confounding for Tar Heels fans.

Davis took over the program in 2021. In that time, he has been as hot and cold as any coach in the country could possibly be. His first season saw the Tar Heels land the eighth seed in the NCAA Tournament. But after that, Davis led North Carolina on an improbable tournament run, ending with a loss to Kansas in the title game.

The Tar Heels regresed the following season, going 20-13 after being the number one team in the country to start the year, and missed the tournament entirely.

Last year, Davis' third, saw North Carolina back on the rise. They went 25-6, won the ACC regular season title, and earned themselves a number one seed in the NCAA Tournament. However, things didn't go as planned for the Tar Heels in March; a loss to Alabama in the Sweet 16 saw them crash out of the tournament early.

This year, North Carolina has struggled to find any kind of consistency. They're 18-11 and firmly on the Tournament bubble. They have losses to Stanford, Wake Forest and Pitt on their resume, and haven't been ranked in the top 25 since December 2.

While those results might be fine at most schools, they haven't and shouldn't be fine at a place like North Carolina, where making the tournament every year is the base level of expectation. The Tar Heels are among the bluest bloods in the entire sport for a reason. Missing the tournament fuilly in two of your four seasons isn't going to cut it for long, especially when your singular deep tournament run in that span came with players almost fully recruited by your predecessor.

I'm not saying Davis needs to be fired; that surprise title game run bought him a fair amount of time, and he's been good on the recruiting trail for the most part. The Tar Heels brought in a top 10 class in 2024, and currently sit ninth in the 2025 class.

Brown's done a good job off the court to buy himself time, but the on-court results are going to catch up to him sooner or later.

The biggest issue might be that as North Carolina has stalled out on the court, their most hated rivals have been on the rise. Duke has been an absolute force on the court this season, ranking second in the country behind a recruiting class that included five five-star recruits, most notably future number one overall NBA Draft pick Cooper Flagg. Slipping this far behind the Blue Devils in terms of on-court results is a great way to be out of a job quickly in Chapel Hill.

Davis has been given a lot of trust by the Tar Heels athletic department to keep this program running smoothly. It's just not clear at this point if he's going to reward that trust with better, more consistent on-court results.

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