Roy Williams, who led North Carolina to three national championships and won 903 games as a college basketball coach, announced his retirement Thursday during a news conference held on the court that carries his name in the Tar Heels’ arena.
Williams, 70, spent 18 seasons at North Carolina, his alma mater, and 15 at Kansas, leading those teams to NCAA tournament berths in all but two seasons in which the event was held. His teams advanced to the Final Four nine times and to the national title game six times.
Williams said the previous six seasons had been “really good,” but he struggled to “push the right buttons” to elevate this year’s team to those heights. His team (18-11) finished fifth in the ACC this year and lost to Florida State in the conference tournament semifinal.
The Tar Heels were blown out by Wisconsin in this year’s NCAA tournament, snapping Williams’s streak of 29 straight first-round wins. After the game, Williams talked about the difficulties of coaching during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I started the season when I was 70 years old and I feel like I’m 103 now,” he said. “It has been a trying year … 2020 and the first part of 2021, I haven’t enjoyed that much.”
He restated that sentiment during Thursday’s news conference, saying he was no longer the right man for the job throughout the event.
“I just never got the team this year where I wanted them to go, I just didn’t get it done,” he said.
“I’m all in for going to baseball parks with the grandkids, but the biggest reason we’re having this meeting is I just don’t feel that I’m the right man any longer.”
Williams’s 903 victories rank third all-time. A 2007 inductee to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Williams reached 900 wins in fewer games (1,161) and seasons (33) than any coach in NCAA history.
“It’s stunning news, although we all knew that Roy Williams was closer to the end of his coaching career than to the beginning,” ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas said in a Twitter video Thursday. “This one caught everybody off-guard on April Fools’ Day, but Roy Williams has been one of the great coaches, not only in college basketball but in American sports over his career. …
“He had a magnificent career at Kansas that was Hall of Fame by itself, then added another Hall of Famer career in his years at North Carolina. … Just an amazing performance by a coach, but more importantly, he’s been an amazing person. He’s a great guy, and I think if you talk to any player, they not only love him but revere him, not just for his coaching ability but for the way he treats them as people. He has great respect for his players, great love for his players and has shown that over the years.”
Roy Williams is retiring after 33 seasons as a head coach.
— ESPN (@espn) April 1, 2021
This moment with Coby White reminds us of the impact he made on his players 🥺 pic.twitter.com/BtdcjbmxeM
In an online media session Thursday evening, North Carolina Athletic Director Lawrence R. “Bubba” Cunningham said he will not rush to fill what he described as “the best job in college basketball.”
“It’s more important to get it right, and be comfortable with the choice we make, than expediency,” said Cunningham. He added that he doesn’t necessarily think the decision would take a particularly long time, noting the issues of recruiting and the transfer portal, that there would not be a search committee and that Williams had already provided some input in the process.
Cunningham said his preference was for a someone with previous head coaching experience but it’s not a requirement. That could keep open the option of promoting Tar Heels assistant Hubert Davis, a former standout player at UNC, but Cunningham might also sift through a long list of plausible candidates.
After serving as an assistant to legendary North Carolina Coach Dean Smith for 10 years, Williams took the head coaching job at Kansas in 1988. In his third season, the Jayhawks advanced to the national title game, where they lost to Duke, and they would make three more trips to the Final Four in 1993, 2002 and 2003.
That final year, the Jayhawks lost to Syracuse in the national championship game. In a CBS Sports interview immediately after the game, Williams blurted out “I could give a s--- about North Carolina right now” in response to a question about speculation that he would leave to take the open job at his alma mater.
One week later, North Carolina announced it was hiring Williams, and he set out to restore the program to national prominence after three disappointing seasons under Matt Doherty. The Tar Heels won the national championship in Williams’s second season, defeating Illinois in the title game with one of the most statistically strong teams of all-time, and he won a title again in 2009 and 2017.
“To choose your own path, to walk away from the game when he wants,” basketball legend Michael Jordan, who played at North Carolina when Williams was an assistant and remains close to him, said of the coach’s decision. “It’s great he now gets to spend more time with his children and grandchildren.”
Since Williams came to North Carolina in 2003, the Tar Heels lead or are tied for the national lead in NCAA tournament wins (45), Final Four appearances (five), national title game appearances (four) and national championships (three). By comparison, ACC rival Duke has 37 NCAA tournament wins, three Final Four appearances, two national title game appearances and two national titles over that span.
“College basketball is losing one of its greatest coaches and a man who genuinely cares about the game of basketball, and more importantly, the people who play it,” Blue Devils Coach Mike Krzyzewski said in a statement. “While we were on opposite sides of college basketball’s greatest rivalry, we both understood how lucky we were to be part of it and always tried to represent it in a way it deserved. Personally, I will miss competing against him, seeing him at coaches’ meetings, and having the opportunity to discuss how to make our game even better. Roy is a great friend, and our sport was very fortunate to have him as long as it did.”
Williams is the only coach to lead two programs to at least four Final Fours each, and the only coach with at least 400 wins at two Division I programs. His departure creates perhaps the most high-profile coaching vacancy in college basketball, and the opening will attract a number of top names.
