College basketball head coaches are rarely in a position to win a national championship in their first year on the job.
If Hubert Davis leads the North Carolina Tar Heels to a national championship, he would be doing something almost unprecedented.
Not only would UNC be winning a national championship as an improbable No. 8 seed, but the Tar Heels would be doing so with a first-time head coach. The former Dean Smith player replaced Roy Williams from within after his mentor retired from the coaching profession this past year. The only thing standing in the way of Davis and UNC is the Bill Self and the No. 1-seeded Kansas Jayhawks.
Should it be a night to celebrate in Chapel Hill, has a first-time head coach ever won a national title in his first year on the job?
Has a first-time head coach ever won a national title in year one on the job?
The answer is technically yes. To date, the only time a first-time college basketball head coach has won a national championship in his first year on the job came in 1989 when Steve Fisher took over the Michigan Wolverines in the interim. This was a team led by future NBA star Glen Rice, helping parlay Fisher into being the iconic head coach of the infamous Fab Five that was to follow.
So what led to Fisher winning it all back in 1989 as the interim head coach? His predecessor Bill Frieder led Michigan to a 24-7 record that season before athletic director Bo Schembechler found out that he had been offered a job to coach the Arizona State Sun Devils. The former Michigan football head coach was furious about it and asked Frieder to leave the program immediately.
Fisher stayed with Michigan through the 1997 season. Though his time at Michigan was mired by scandal from the Fab Five era, Fisher later achieved great success coaching the likes of Kawhi Leonard with the San Diego State Aztecs over in the Mountain West Conference. If Davis gets the thing done on Monday night, he would be the first non-interim head coach to accomplish the feat.
Nobody expected Davis or North Carolina to be on the precipice of winning the whole thing now.
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