North Carolina Doubles Down on Pro Experiment With Michael Malone

The North Carolina optimist will point out that the Tar Heels now have both a football and men’s basketball coach who has won championships at the highest level of their respective sports.

The North Carolina pessimist will counter that it also has two coaches who were fired from the jobs where they won titles, were out of the profession at the time they were hired by the school and have scant knowledge of coaching in college.

However you choose to look at it, Carolina has gone pro with a pair of shocker hires for its biggest coaching positions. Hopefully for the Tar Heels, former Denver Nuggets coach Michael Malone hits the ground more prepared for the basketball job than former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick did for football.

Malone’s name was scant in public reporting about the North Carolina vacancy until suddenly he had the job. He was fired almost exactly a year ago by the Nuggets, two seasons after winning a title, and has been working this season as an ESPN analyst. This was a hire of the Wait, what, who? variety.

Karl Malone? Post Malone? Oh, Michael Malone.

The NBA coach whose name was in circulation for North Carolina was Chicago Bulls boss Billy Donovan, he of the two national titles at Florida in 2006 and ’07. But Donovan might have gotten what he wanted to stay with that franchise when vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas and general manager Marc Eversley were fired Monday.

Meanwhile, what began as an A-list of accomplished college candidates for the job changed drastically in recent days. Coaches in the Carolina mix were getting raises (Tommy Lloyd at Arizona) or making public expressions of loyalty to their schools (Dusty May at Michigan, T.J. Otzelberger at Iowa State).

Was this a panic hire in response to rejection? Or a hire made in haste to beat the opening of the transfer portal window Tuesday? Malone’s daughter is on the North Carolina volleyball team; did he make a campus visit and just pop his head into athletic director Bubba Cunningham’s office to say he’d be interested in the job?

We may never know those answers for sure. Nor do we know whether this surprise hire will work out. But it needs to, and quickly. A 4–8 football record in Belichick’s debut season was much more easily tolerated than a similar flop in the sport where Carolina has a history of winning big.

Nikola Jokić is to Malone as Tom Brady was to Belichick—a career-making talent. Malone’s NBA head coaching record with Jokić on his roster is 471–327. His record without Jokić, in fewer than two seasons at Sacramento, is 39–67. Maybe Jokić can put in a few recruiting calls back home in the Balkans in support of Malone.

Prior to those NBA head coaching stints, Malone spent a dozen years as an NBA assistant. Before that he was a college assistant at Manhattan (under Bobby Gonzalez), Providence (under Pete Gillen) and Oakland (under Greg Kampe). So he’s not a complete college neophyte, as Belichick was—but it’s been 25 years. Everything has changed since then.

This hire was always going to be a departure from the Dean Smith family tree. But this is a whole separate forest, offering a snapshot of how dramatically things are changing in what used to be the most traditional of athletic departments. It’s a radical makeover.

Cunningham, a 30-year college athletic administrator, is on his way to retirement from the AD job. He is being replaced by Steve Newmark, a NASCAR executive. There is a battle over the future of the basketball arena, the Dean Smith Center, which seems likely to end with a new venue located off campus. That has touched off an internal firestorm within the fan and alumni base.

And the school is clearly embracing outside-the-box marquee hires.

Belichick and his staff misjudged the player acquisition piece of the job. They wound up with a marginal ACC roster and were blown out by TCU, Central Florida, Clemson and North Carolina State. We’ll see how effectively the roster was upgraded this fall.

North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick had a rocky first season in the college ranks. | Eakin Howard-Imagn Images

The 54-year-old Malone must hit the ground running in terms of solidifying a promising Tar Heels roster. Player retention is vital, with 7-footer Henri Veesaar, guards Derek Dixon and Luka Bogavac and forward Jarin Stevenson at the top of that list. Plus there are highly regarded high schoolers Dylan Mingo and Maximo Adams. Then there will be work to do adding players via the portal.

If Malone coaches a similar style to what his Nuggets teams employed, North Carolina should be an attractive place to play. They routinely were in the top half of the league in scoring and among the leaders in field goal percentage. Of course, having someone with Jokić skills as an offensive hub will be difficult to replicate, especially at the college level.

It would be a mistake if North Carolina rushed into this decision with the opening of the portal driving the decision. Fans are always on the ledge over recruiting, but a single transfer/signing class isn’t worth making a bad hire that sets the program back.

Maybe Michael Malone will be the guy who leads North Carolina back to winning championships, a worthy heir to the lineage of Dean Smith and Roy Williams. Maybe he will tank the program. Maybe he will be somewhere in between.

Like the Belichick hire, there is absolutely no way to know for sure how well this will work until the product is observable in competition. But once again, North Carolina is rolling the dice on a pro move, as it continues to move away from the traditional college sports model.

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