{"id":196160,"date":"2025-09-03T06:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T06:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/196160\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T06:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T06:47:10","slug":"hubert-davis-recognizes-pressure-to-meet-unc-basketball-standard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/196160\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubert Davis Recognizes Pressure to Meet UNC Basketball Standard"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 North Carolina coach Hubert Davis<\/a><\/strong> on Tuesday acknowledged the inherent pressure valve that\u2019s attached to the approaching college basketball season, his fifth campaign in charge.<\/p>\n

>>>\u00a0Welcome to the new home of Inside Carolina!\u00a0Reactivate your account for $1<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel the same way that I\u2019ve felt the last four years,\u201d he said at the Smith Center, during an interview availability<\/a><\/strong>. \u201cThere 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, \u2018the standard is the standard.\u2019 And there\u2019s an expectation every year for us to reach that standard.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

UNC resumes preseason practices in full in three weeks\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Davis\u2019s UNC teams have compiled an overall record of 101-45, with a 56-24 mark in ACC league play. He\u2019s the third-fastest coach at Carolina to reach 100 career victories, and sixth-fastest in ACC history, behind only Duke\u2019s Vic Bubas (in 128 games), UNC\u2019s Roy Williams (129 games), Wake Forest\u2019s Skip Prosser (136 games), UNC\u2019s Frank McGuire (139 games) and Maryland\u2019s Lefty Driesell (142 games).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 68-team field last season, before falling in the Round of 64 to finish 23-14 overall.<\/p>\n

Since then, Davis has a new boss on board. UNC has hired former NASCAR executive Steve Newmark as its athletic director in waiting. He\u2019s working alongside the outgoing Bubba Cunningham until next summer, when the AD job changes hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, there\u2019s a pressure and expectation to be good this year,\u201d Davis said Tuesday. \u201cBut also in some sense, to keep it there, if that makes sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first year, we were a rebound away from winning the national championship. But the next year, we win 20 games and we don\u2019t make it to the NCAA Tournament. And then the third year, we\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 North Carolina coach Hubert Davis on Tuesday acknowledged the inherent pressure valve that\u2019s attached…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":196161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1339,1317,1337,1338,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-196160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115139028437618670","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}