Three games, one collapse: How UNC’s season spiraled, ending Hubert Davis’ tenure

The television was on. The room buzzed with quiet anticipation. Players, managers and staff gathered in Hubert Davis’ living room, eyes glued to the screen on Selection Sunday.

Eventually, their path was revealed: North Carolina, a No. 6 seed, set to face VCU in Greenville, South Carolina. Smiles broke out, claps echoed off the walls. Then Davis addressed the group.

“We’ve been invited to Greenville, South Carolina, to play in the tournament. It’s the only thing on our mind. We get an opportunity to play two games. So in our mind, in our preparation, in our practice, in our play, the only thing that we’re thinking about is, ‘Let’s win two games in Greenville… our mind and our focus is on VCU.’”

Just over a week later, the energy couldn’t have been more different in that same living room.

On Tuesday night, Davis called his team together again — this time to tell them he had been fired, ending his five-year tenure as North Carolina’s head coach less than a week after the Tar Heels’ first-round NCAA Tournament loss.

The meeting with players and staff was scheduled for 9 p.m., but the news broke via multiple media outlets around 8:54 p.m., meaning many learned of Davis’ departure en route to the team meeting, a source confirmed to The News & Observer.

What a far cry it was from the mood in that same room just over a week prior. What a far cry it was, even, from the day before UNC tipped off in the NCAA Tournament.

During shootaround in Greenville, Caleb Wilson danced along the baseline. Staff members — from assistant coach Sean May to director of operations Eric Hoots — launched 3-pointers from the corner, trading playful smack talk. Assistant coach Marcus Paige played one-on-one with guard Isaiah Denis, drilling a shot in the freshman’s face before reminding him he still had it.

Not even 36 hours later, North Carolina’s season was over — an 82-78 overtime loss to VCU after blowing a 19-point second-half lead, the largest comeback in a first-round NCAA Tournament game.

At its peak, Davis’ roster looked more than the part: a second-team All-American in Caleb Wilson, a 7-foot floor-stretching forward in Henri Veesaar, an uber-athletic veteran guard in Seth Trimble, a versatile defender in Jarin Stevenson and an increasingly confident freshman point guard in Derek Dixon.

But in a season punctuated by injuries, the group never fully coalesced — never fully finding the consistency, identity or cohesion required to sustain a postseason run.

So how did it all unwind? Slowly, then all at once.

‘Keeping our circle’

Three weeks earlier, the messaging inside North Carolina’s program was simple: “just us.”

The phrase closed every team huddle — a two-word mantra meant to insulate a roster from outside criticism. With 10 new faces and a season that had, at times, veered off, it became both a rallying cry and a necessity.

“That’s the most important thing on this team,” Trimble said on March 5. “Keeping our circle just us, hearing only just us and relying on just us takes us such a long way.”

The idea had been introduced months earlier, tucked inside a preseason handbook Davis gave each player. On the notebook, every player’s name was connected, forming a circle.

“There are going to be good times,” Davis said on March 5. “There are going to be sunny and clear sky days, but there are also going to be some windy and rainy days. And through those days, we have to stay connected.”

By early March, this North Carolina squad had lived through both.

An uneven start to ACC play — three losses in the first five games — forced some early reflection. Injuries along the way — first to Trimble, then to Wilson and Veesaar — compounded the instability. Lineups shifted. Roles blurred. And yet, the Tar Heels began to stabilize.

They entered the regular-season finale at Duke on March 7 having won 10 of their previous 12 games.

Even more telling: they had done so while shorthanded. Fifteen times during the season, leading into the March 7 contest, North Carolina played without one of its top three scorers. It won 12 of those games.

Most notably, the Tar Heels had been without Wilson, its leading scorer, for nearly a month.

“You see Caleb, he’s a star player on the bench celebrating for everybody else,” Veesaar said March 5. “There’s nobody who thinks, ‘I don’t want anybody doing too good because it might take my minutes.’ Everybody is just celebrating each other.”

Part of that, surely, was rooted in the optimism that Wilson would be back soon.

North Carolina’s freshman star had spent much of February working his way back from a fractured left hand, progressing from a cast to individual workouts, then inching closer to full contact with the rematch against Duke around the corner, the ACC Tournament looming and the NCAA Tournament in the distance.

Then, in an instant, that all disappeared.

During a non-contact drill in practice on March 5, Wilson went up for a dunk in warmups and injured his right thumb — a freak injury that ended his season just as his return had come into view.

“I was like, ‘Dang, that’s crazy,’” Wilson later said. “But I dunked hard, so maybe I should start dunking softer.”

There would be no return. No March debut. No second chance to reinsert the player around whom the roster had been built.

Without Wilson, the rematch at No. 1 Duke quickly exposed the edge North Carolina no longer had. The Tar Heels struggled to generate consistent offense and were overwhelmed on the glass, particularly after halftime, when Duke dominated second-chance opportunities and pulled away for a 76-61 win at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

What had been a strength in the first rivalry meeting — interior scoring and physicality — disappeared and, in its place: stalled possessions, limited shot creation and an inability to match Duke’s efficiency. For a team that had spent weeks adjusting, this version of North Carolina looked incomplete.

And, against elite competition, overmatched.

‘We let a lot of people down’

The following week in Charlotte was more of the same.

In UNC’s locker room at the Spectrum Center after an 80-79 ACC Tournament quarterfinal loss to Clemson, the vibes were, in the words of Wilson, “pretty bad.”

“Pissed off. Sad. Disappointed,” Veesaar added, after a career night of 28 points and 17 rebounds. “We let a lot of people down.”

By the time March Madness arrived, it was clear the Tar Heels had the pieces — even without Wilson. Veesaar’s dominance. Trimble’s leadership. Dixon’s shooting. They just hadn’t applied them consistently.

Against Clemson, UNC fell behind by 18 in the second half before clawing back to a single possession. The fight arrived late, as Stevenson later said.

“We just didn’t give effort the whole game,” Jonathan Powell said after the loss. “Then the last five, six minutes we finally decided to play hard.”

In the ACC quarterfinal, Veesaar had set the tone early, attacking inside, barking at teammates, and producing his 14th double-double. Dixon hit timely threes down the stretch. Davis had preached response to adversity all season long, but the Tar Heels too often waited for desperation to ignite their best play.

As the team prepared for Selection Sunday, the lesson was clear: the answers were inside the locker room. In the lessons learned over months of starts. In stops and late surges.

The question, at that point, was whether North Carolina could finally use them before time ran out.

‘Hasn’t been consistent’

North Carolina’s season ended in a historic collapse. Against No. 11 seed VCU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on March 19, the Tar Heels built a 19-point lead late in the second half — 56-37 on a layup by Trimble with 14:58 left — only to see it evaporate. The Rams chipped away steadily before sending the game to overtime.

UNC, which had controlled much of the second half, managed just three points in the final five minutes of overtime and missed its last nine field-goal attempts, including all six shots in OT. VCU’s red-hot guard Terrence Hill Jr. scored 17 points in that stretch alone, finishing with a career-high 34.

The 82-78 defeat marked the largest comeback in a first-round NCAA Tournament game and the sixth-largest blown lead in March Madness history.

For Davis, it was another gut punch in a postseason career at UNC marked by early exits and a historic 2022-23 season that saw the preseason No. 1 Tar Heels miss the NCAA Tournament field entirely.

“I’ve been chasing getting back to that one seed, and getting back to being in a top-10 team in the country,” Trimble said after the VCU loss. “Really, just getting back to dominating. We’ve shown that we can do it in recent years — but it hasn’t been consistent.”

He paused.

“I don’t really know where it’s at,” Trimble added, “but it’s gonna get back.”

The loss extended a troubling pattern: North Carolina has advanced past the first round just once in the last four seasons under Davis.

Asked about the Tar Heels’ recent postseason struggles after this season’s exit, Davis seemed at a loss for words.

“That’s a big thinking question, and I apologize, I’m just not there right now,” Davis said postgame. “Just really sad that we’re not continuing to play and to move forward, because I have loved and enjoyed this team.”

‘Not an easy decision’

In the days following UNC’s historic first-round collapse against VCU, the pressure on Davis intensified behind the scenes. After the team returned to Chapel Hill, outgoing athletic director Bubba Cunningham began confidential talks with Davis, evaluating the team’s future and Davis’ proposed plan to address its shortcomings.

By Sunday, Cunningham, incoming AD Steve Newmark, and Chancellor Lee Roberts were meeting to assess Davis’ leadership and the program’s financial flexibility. UNC boosters also weighed in throughout the process, expressing concerns that retaining Davis could limit the resources available for roster-building, including scholarship and recruiting support for top prospects.

Davis presented his vision for improvement on Monday. After reviewing the proposals, Cunningham and Newmark made their recommendation to Roberts for leadership change. On Tuesday evening, March 24, Davis was called to an emergency meeting with Cunningham and Newmark and informed he would not return for a sixth season.

In essence, he was fired.

“This was not an easy decision because of Hubert’s tremendous character and all he has given to the program,” Cunningham said in a statement. “But we must move forward in a way that allows our team to compete more consistently at an elite level.”

The move marks a historic break from Carolina tradition: for the first time in more than 70 years, UNC will likely look outside the Tar Heel family to hire its next men’s basketball coach.

It’s a signal of both the program’s high expectations, but also its willingness to hit reset after a season-ending meltdown.

This story was originally published March 27, 2026 at 5:30 AM.