UNC's high-risk hire of Michael Malone shows that blue-blood jobs have lost some allure
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.
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.
Continue to the original source for the full article.