North Carolina’s failure to land one of its top-tier coaching targets has laid bare how much the college basketball landscape has shifted since the dawning of the NIL era. 

Being a blue blood is no longer as much of a built-in advantage. Now what matters more is how much green a program can offer prized recruits.

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Over the course of the past two weeks, North Carolina has tried to coax Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, Michigan’s Dusty May and Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan to come to Chapel Hill. Lloyd used interest from the Tar Heels as leverage to negotiate a new deal to stay in Tucson, May also passed and Donovan apparently wasn’t interested enough to engage before the end of the NBA regular season next weekend.

That left North Carolina outgoing athletic director Bubba Cunningham and incoming athletic director Steve Newmark without many proven options as backup plans. Alabama’s Nate Oats negotiated a contract extension that will make him one of the sport’s five highest-paid coaches. Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger also publicly removed himself from consideration for other jobs. North Carolina even tried to set up an in-person interview with Iowa’s Ben McCollum on Sunday, according to CBSSports.com, only to have him turn down that invitation. 

With options dwindling and time running out before the transfer portal opens Tuesday, North Carolina pivoted to an outside-the-box hire as it seeks to reestablish itself as one of the sport’s elite programs. The Tar Heels are reportedly set to hire Michael Malone, who won an NBA title with the Denver Nuggets but was fired near the end of the 2024-25 regular season.

If North Carolina’s coaching search was a litmus test, then the hire of Malone is further evidence that the blue-blood jobs are no longer as coveted as they once were. After all, North Carolina is taking a chance on someone who has coached in the NBA for the previous two decades and who last coached at the college level as an assistant at Providence from 1995-98 and Manhattan from 1999-2001.

Michael Malone went 510-394 as an NBA head coach with the Sacramento Kings and Denver Nuggets. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)Thearon W. Henderson via Getty Images

These big swings and misses from North Carolina come on the heels of a similar search at Kentucky two years ago. Athletic director Mitch Barnhart’s top targets were UConn’s Dan Hurley, Baylor’s Scott Drew and Donovan. Only when he wasn’t able to persuade any of those three to come to Lexington did he pivot to Kentucky alum Mark Pope.

What that suggests is the blue-blood jobs are no longer leaps and bounds above jobs at other power-conference programs who are flush with deep-pocketed donors or football-generated revenue. Shoe companies don’t have as much influence over where highly ranked high school prospects go to college. Winning tradition, brand recognition and top-tier facilities also aren’t as important selling points as they once were. 

Now, the first thing an agent representing an elite player usually wants to know is whether a school can meet the requisite price tag. Only then does the program’s winning track record or ability to develop pros come into play.

As Tennessee coach Rick Barnes put it last month, “Today, it's easy. You can recruit a guy now for a week and get him. You know what I mean? Hey, what's the number?”

This isn’t to say that the likes of North Carolina, Duke, Kansas and Kentucky aren’t still elite jobs in the current environment. Basketball matters above all else at those schools. They will likely keep paying top dollar to assemble competitive rosters. But there’s now less incentive to chase those blue-blood jobs for coaches like May or Lloyd or Oats who already have built strong programs and already have the resources to contend for conference and national titles.

North Carolina could have responded by either waiting another week to see if Donovan would have engaged or offering the job to a second-tier candidate like Vanderbilt’s Mark Byington. Cunningham and Newmark instead opted for the surprise hire of Malone, whose lone previous tie to North Carolina is that his daughter is an outside hitter on the Tar Heels’ volleyball team.

One advantage to going with Malone is that North Carolina doesn’t having to pay millions of dollars in buyout money like it would have for a sitting college head coach. Byington’s buyout was reportedly in the $11 million range, a lot for a coach who is two years removed from coaching at James Madison and has yet to advance to the NCAA tournament’s second weekend.

Malone also has the reputation of a shrewd Xs-and-Os coach with an understanding of modern basketball and a knack for maximizing the talent on his roster. His NBA pedigree theoretically should appeal to recruits, while his relationship with superagent Miško Ražnatović should only help North Carolina land top European talent.

Still, the track record of NBA lifers adapting to the college game is iffy at best. It isn’t even just the former superstar players like Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullin, Juwan Howard, Patrick Ewing and Jerry Stackhouse who have tried and failed. Mike Woodson won a single NCAA tournament game in four years at Indiana. Mike Dunleavy Sr. went 24-69 in three disastrous seasons as head coach at Tulane.

It also doesn’t lend confidence if North Carolina board of trustees chairman Malcolm Turner had any hand in this hire. Turner’s disastrous tenure as Vanderbilt athletic director included the ill-fated decision to fire Bryce Drew after three seasons and anoint Stackhouse as his replacement. 

While a program with the history of North Carolina probably shouldn’t have to make such a high-risk hire, the good news for the Tar Heels is they’re better off taking a swing on Malone than sticking with Hubert Davis.

After five inconsistent seasons, North Carolina couldn’t retain Davis if it was serious about returning to its customary levels of success. At least there’s upside with Malone if he can surround himself with an experienced staff and learn the nuances of the college game on the fly.

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