Dick Badhair

If You Love UNC - It's Time To Resign
Editorial on Dick Baddour
By: Eddy Landreth, 9/13/04


Dick Baddour has served Carolina for many years, and he would be the first to tell us that he loves the school.

So the time has come for Mr. Baddour to show his affection and loyalty for Carolina by resigning his position as director of athletics and allowing the university to hire a more qualified person to return UNC to the prominence it once enjoyed.

Chancellor James Moeser could reassign Baddour to another area of the university, which would let Baddour maintain a job and his dignity. Baddour has served the university well in other areas, and he could do so again, but the facts show his expertise does not lie in leading the department of athletics.

When he took his job, North Carolina was in the middle of back-to-back Final Four appearances in men’s basketball, back-to-back appearances in the nation’s top 10 in football, and it held a stranglehold on Olympic sports in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Football has gone from its strongest position in the history of the school, a period that saw UNC spend $50 million on its football facilities, to being last in the ACC and looking worse than ever at the start of a new season.

The decline can be directly traced to Baddour’s decisions. When he didn’t get his first choice after football coach Mack Brown left for Texas, Baddour panicked and promoted defensive coordinator Carl Torbush.

Two years later, Torbush told a reporter the Friday before the season-finale against Duke that the coach was going to be fired. Three days later, Baddour changed his mind, effectively rehiring Torbush. This led to a blow in recruiting, and it made a laughingstock of UNC.

A year later, Baddour fired Torbush. When Frank Beamer used Baddour and UNC to get a raise at Virginia Tech, Baddour hired alumnus John Bunting. Bunting had no experience as a Division I head coach and after some initial success in his first season, the program has bottomed out.

During the same period of time, Al Groh at Virginia and Ralph Friedgen at Maryland have built powerful, successful programs. Friedgen did it with players left from a losing program. Groh, who lost to UNC in his first season, did it through recruiting.

In basketball, when Bill Guthridge decided to retire in 2000, UNC naturally went after alumnus Roy Williams.

When Williams surprised everyone, Dean Smith included, by turning down the job, Baddour decided not to take the advice of Smith, the winningest coach in history and a man revered for his knowledge and integrity.

Instead, Baddour hired alumnus Matt Doherty for a pressure-cooker of a job when Doherty had been a head coach for all of one season. Smith scoffed at this but was unable to influence the decision.

The aftermath was that UNC basketball eventually suffered through its worst season in history, broke most of the streaks built during Smith’s and Guthridge’s tenures and nearly imploded before Baddour finally forced Doherty to resign.

The only thing that saved Carolina basketball was Smith’s relationship with Williams, who answered the call a second time around.

Olympic sports have declined in their performance as well. In the three years leading up to Baddour’s getting the job, the Tar Heels won 29 ACC titles.

In the last three years, Carolina has won 15 titles, just four in each of the past two seasons. This past school year, UNC failed to win a men’s ACC championship of any kind in the 51-year history of the league.

All along, Baddour has been indecisive while appearing to care more about what people think than being a strong leader and making bold decisions.

A lack of accountability is the worst part. Businesses across this country and beyond have fired CEOs during this same period after poor decisions hurt their status in the stock market.

UNC’s athletic stock has been steamrolled, but Baddour received a renewal of his contract when the majority of his constituency wanted change. Morale in the athletic department has suffered. Even the Tar Heels’ competitors shake their heads privately and wonder how a school that achieved such dominance on the athletic fields while winning the image contest as well could have slid so far so quickly.

The time for the slide to end has arrived. The time for Dick Baddour to display his love for his university is here. He should step aside, ask to be reassigned within the school and let the process of healing and moving ahead to begin.

Changing football coaches alone isn’t going to get it this time. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill deserves a new leader.

 

Dean Smith will take over this position within two years.

Straight from Michael's mouth.

 

Baddour is a loser

 

I love these premises.
*Suddenly, Bill Guthridge isn't so bad. Actually, this is true. Guthridge wasn't Smith, and had weaknesses, but he was a very fine coach who could've taken the team to a continued level of success for a number of years longer.
*Dick Baddour is holding Roy Williams down.
Roy Williams will be the God that the hype had suggested, if only y'all can get rid of this idiot loser AD. Then Williams will be invincible, and no one will be able to stop him from conquering Heaven and Earth, curing cancer, and maybe beating Duke.
*Doherty was a mistake, Baddour's mistake, and every mistake the underqualified Doherty made, was Baddour's mistake.
*John Bunting was a mistake and having a new AD will surely grab (insert ridiculously big name here, and don't learn the lesson that the writer suggests should've been learned at successful ACC programs) and UNC will be a powerhouse in a tougher conference.
(honestly, I think that Bunting was a fine coach. He's lost his program, and it turns out he can't recruit, but part of that's losing assistant coaches who were excellent recruits. It happens, but then you go and you get other quality coaches rather than promoting shitty ones)





Don't get me wrong. Dick Baddour does, in fact, suck. John Swofford was, in fact, a hell of an Athletic Director.

And regardless of anything else, a brand new AD isn't going to just make everything mildly decent into perfection, nor make greatness out of an empty hole. It's a matter of scapegoating, and nothing more.

 

dude, I hope you're right. Dean still has a office there, and he still loves his University. Like I said in an earlier post, I think DB ran DES off. If DES does take that posistion, I think it's obvious that DB did run DES off. Dean says several times he was tired of the business aspects that everyone kept trying to bring into College basketball.

 

well nobody is gonna go in there and turn things around overnight. dick baddour has proven himself to be wishy-washy at best when making the big time decisions (coaching hires) at unc. he really has no business anywhere near the controls of an athletic program with the national prominence that unc has, or did have. his track record speaks for itself. whats the old saying? "you cant fire the whole team"........

 

i disagree, Dean knows what it takes. He's been around a long time, hes seen schools successes and he has seen schools failures. I'm sure he can do it, overnight.

 

him or michael.........right?

 

or God himself, if the first two aren't available.

I tell you, I know hope springs eternal and all, but damn.

 

Baddour is a joke. While I really think it's time for Bunting to go it scares me that it will be Baddour once again screwing the pooch when he tries to replace him.