RJ Davis’s Return to North Carolina Is a Win in the NIL Era
It wasn’t long ago that men’s college basketball’s All-Americans were essentially locks to head to the pros.
There’s only so much to accomplish while still in college, and climbing that mountain to be one of the sport’s best usually meant it was time to move on, whether or not the player’s pro prospects were strong.
The name, image and likeness era has changed that.
The North Carolina Tar Heels’ RJ Davis is poised to be the latest star to extend his stay in college basketball. As first reported by CBS Sports’s Matt Norlander, Davis is expected to announce his return to North Carolina for a fifth and final season in 2024–25. Once officially announced, he’ll be the third consensus first-team All-American in as many years to return to school the following season. In the decade prior, just two first-teamers elected to return to school for another year, with one (Doug McDermott) a special case as the son of his head coach.
There’s no question NIL (or at least the NCAA’s shaky free-for-all rollout) has caused plenty of headaches across the sport. It has catalyzed an already active transfer portal as players hunt for big paydays and created an uncomfortable dynamic of coaches seemingly blaming fans for not spending even more of their hard-earned money to build great teams. It’s by no means a perfect system and one that increasingly feels like a stopgap for some form of true pay-for-play that will eventually come to college sports.
But if there’s one thing the NIL era has brought to college hoops, it’s something fans of the sport have been pining for for years: star retention. Davis will enter next season as a leading candidate for National Player of the Year and a recognizable star to be one of the faces of the sport. He’ll have a real chance of topping Tyler Hansbrough as UNC’s all-time leading scorer, currently 784 points behind the Carolina legend, coincidentally the exact number of points Davis scored in 2023–24. Hansbrough spent more than a decade as the last defending NPOY to return to school, a face of the sport few could top. While neither Oscar Tshiebwe nor Zach Edey quite reached Hansbrough’s level of fame in the sport, their respective returns were paradigm-shifters for the sport and have set the tone for a new era of not needing to rush out of college basketball.
Davis’s whirlwind career has seen some remarkable ups and downs. He started his career with the Heels on Roy Williams’s final team in Chapel Hill, coming off the bench on a middling 18–11 Carolina team that got blasted in the first round of the NCAA tournament by the Wisconsin Badgers. As a sophomore, Hubert Davis entrusted Davis with the point guard position, and he helped key UNC’s Cinderella run through March that came up a few points short of a national championship. Then, Davis was part of one of the most disappointing teams in recent college hoops memory, a 2022–23 Heels club that went from preseason No. 1 to missing the Big Dance. And with his back against the wall, Davis delivered a masterful senior campaign, blossoming into the nation’s best guard and leading North Carolina to a No. 1 seed. His return gives him one more chance to etch himself into North Carolina lore with a national championship and, if nothing else, checker his name throughout all of the Chapel Hill record books.
In a pre-NIL world, Davis is almost assuredly off to the pros, maximizing his stock off a monster season. He’d likely have gotten a two-way contract had he gone all in on the NBA draft process this spring and begun his journey of attempting to carve out a niche in the NBA. Instead, he can stay in college for an extra year, be the unquestioned star and likely make as much, if not more, money than he would have on the NBA’s fringes next season. That may offend some of the sport’s hard-line traditionalists, but you’d have a hard time convincing me that it isn’t great for the overall health of the sport.
Imagine the buzz next season’s Duke vs. North Carolina rivalry games will have. The last few meetings since Mike Krzyzewski and Williams’s retirements have felt a bit stale. But Davis as the face of the Heels vs. freshman sensation Cooper Flagg and the Blue Devils? Now that’s a regular-season matchup with some juice for the casual college basketball observer. Fans will never stop tuning into the single-elimination theater that is the NCAA tournament, but the nonstop roster turnover that has hit basically every program in the country does make it harder for the non-diehards to follow the sport the rest of the year. The Caitlin Clark phenomenon can be credited for some of the NCAA women’s tournament’s massive ratings boom, but so can having teams and storylines (the LSU Tigers’ repeat attempt, the South Carolina Gamecocks’ revenge) that carried over from year to year. Early NBA departures will always make that hard to accomplish in the men’s game, but players like Davis with shakier pro outlooks coming back makes a huge difference.
College basketball is better when its best players want to stay longer. NIL is helping make that a reality, and that’s worth celebrating. The more players who follow RJ Davis’s lead, the better.
