The University of North Carolina is hosting a press conference this morning at which chancellor Holden Thorp and athletic director Dick Baddour will officially announce that Butch Davis is no longer the coach of the Tar Heels football program. This is the part where people are supposed to gasp loudly and drop their monocles on the ground, because Davis ran such a clean and respectable program in his four years at UNC.
So what then, aside from those silly NCAA punishments and investigations, caused these men to make such a hasty and shocking decision?
“To restore confidence in the University of North Carolina and our football program, it’s time to make a change,” said Thorp. “What started as a purely athletic issue has begun to chip away at this University’s reputation. I have been deliberate in my approach to understanding this situation fully, and I have worked to be fair to everyone involved. However, I have lost confidence in our ability to come through this without harming the way people think of this institution. Our academic integrity is paramount and we must work diligently to protect it. The only way to move forward and put this behind us is to make a change.” (Via NBC)
I don’t want to sully the image that Thorp apparently believes that we have of UNC any further, but I’m pretty sure that short of using orphans as tackling dummies, we can’t think much less of UNC football. And I’m not saying that as in we have a poor opinion, it’s just that we have no opinion. Seriously, who actually cares about UNC football?
Instead of giving the same lame speeches about how the reputation of UNC has been sullied, Thorp and Baddour should just save us all some time and hire Mike Leach, so we can all praise/chastise them for a ballsy/wrong hire, and then go back to not caring about the Heels when they finish in the middle of the Coastal Division once again. Why mess with tradition?
