Hubert Davis Recognizes Pressure to Meet UNC Basketball Standard

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina coach Hubert Davis on Tuesday acknowledged the inherent pressure valve that’s attached to the approaching college basketball season, his fifth campaign in charge.

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“I feel the same way that I’ve felt the last four years,” he said at the Smith Center, during an interview availability. “There is a pressure and expectation for us to be good this year. But that pressure and that expectation for us to be good is no different than any other year. The standard is at the highest here, and I always talk to the guys, ‘the standard is the standard.’ And there’s an expectation every year for us to reach that standard.”

Particularly now across the course of the 2025-26 season. And especially because Davis, general manager Jim Tanner and the Tar Heels have committed an investment of more than $14 million toward an overhauled roster that includes six additions through the NCAA transfer portal (Kyan Evans, Ivan Matlekovic, Jonathan Powell, Jarin Stevenson, Henri Veesaar, Jaydon Young), three freshman recruits (Isaiah Denis, Derek Dixon, Caleb Wilson), and an international import (Luka Bogavac) with four seasons of professional experience in European leagues.

UNC resumes preseason practices in full in three weeks’ time, before exhibition games Oct. 24 at BYU and Oct. 29 against Winston-Salem State set the table for the Nov. 3 season opener against Central Arkansas.

Davis’s UNC teams have compiled an overall record of 101-45, with a 56-24 mark in ACC league play. He’s the third-fastest coach at Carolina to reach 100 career victories, and sixth-fastest in ACC history, behind only Duke’s Vic Bubas (in 128 games), UNC’s Roy Williams (129 games), Wake Forest’s Skip Prosser (136 games), UNC’s Frank McGuire (139 games) and Maryland’s Lefty Driesell (142 games).

The Tar Heels reached the 2022 NCAA championship game in their first season under Davis, and claimed the ACC regular-season title on the way to earning a No. 1 seed assignment in the 2024 NCAA Tournament. But UNC also has made it a habit of sweating out anxious months of March on NCAA bubble watch in three of the past four seasons. Carolina picked up the final at-large berth in the tournament’s 68-team field last season, before falling in the Round of 64 to finish 23-14 overall.

Since then, Davis has a new boss on board. UNC has hired former NASCAR executive Steve Newmark as its athletic director in waiting. He’s working alongside the outgoing Bubba Cunningham until next summer, when the AD job changes hands.

“Yeah, there’s a pressure and expectation to be good this year,” Davis said Tuesday. “But also in some sense, to keep it there, if that makes sense.

“The first year, we were a rebound away from winning the national championship. But the next year, we win 20 games and we don’t make it to the NCAA Tournament. And then the third year, we’re a top-five team pretty much the whole season, No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, won the (ACC) regular-season title. Then last year, we won 23 games and just made the NCAA Tournament. And so there is a determination to get there and to stay there.”