UNC Football: Tar Heels Waste No Time in Naming Withers Interim Head Coach

A day after firing Butch Davis, UNC surprised most observers again by promoting its defensive coordinator Everett Withers to Interim Head Coach of its football team. Few teams have had the audacity of promoting from within so soon. Yet, doing so made a lot of sense.

Over the course of the next several months, several things are certain at UNC. Interim Head Coach Everett Withers will not cause any flack among the faithful. In a year of uncertain offense, giving the reins of the rising football team expected to maintain their current 8-4 streak to the mastermind of the defense makes a lot of sense.

And a quick promotion helps steady a ship that has been rocked for more than a year by disclosures and uncertainty due to NCAA investigations into problems caused by many football players and others during the past few years.

UNC apparently overlooked the fact that perhaps the majority of players who have been punished and were the focal point of the investigation were on its defense. But leaving this point aside, the move has to be considered a good one for UNC.

Immediately after Butch Davis was dismissed, one had to wonder if UNC were going to be plunged back into the thicket of college football obscurity.

Would they be able to find anyone decent to coach football at UNC even for a year? And if they were, was the choice going to be simply giving the term "interim" to someone few knew or expected to stay very long?

Choosing Withers has a ring of familiarity, and much more solidity, than most Carolina alumni could have expected 24 hours ago. Indeed, the announcement came so soon, UNC almost certainly planned to put Withers under contract even before Butch Davis was fired.

Withers has paid his dues in coaching, and it was time for him to get a change to be a head coach.

Withers, a North Carolinian from Charlotte, held jobs at Appalachian State and Texas under Mack Brown, and at several other colleges as well as the Saints and Titans in the NFL. During this time, he has acquitted himself well with perhaps his best job at Carolina.

His tenure as defensive coordinator at UNC included defenses with great talent. Even last year, by some statistics, his defense did well despite many key losses due to the NCAA investigations. Some have claimed that his defenses have not lived up to expectations.

Indeed, unlike in prior years, the offense did more to help the defense last season than in the prior two years when the offense was maintained by the defense. Yet Withers' defense was still 4th in the ACC and 30th in the country.

While many may be tempted to say that "interim" will last until the end of the season, the truth is that "interim" depends often on early results. If Withers were to put together a great start, then UNC will change his title immediately.

Otherwise, if Withers proves himself worthy through a 7-5 season, the result will certainly be an offer for a permanent job.

Withers joins 24 other head coaching changes this year in Division 1A football.

Among the changes, perhaps none was more rocky and unusual than the change at West Virginia, where the university took the unusual step of naming a new head coach who was to take over two seasons after he was hired. As reported in the excellent article by CFP:

Dana Holgorsen didn't have to wait until next year, after all. West Virginia announced on June 10 that it had elevated Holgorsen to head coach and parted ways with Bill Stewart. Holgorsen was hired away from Oklahoma State last December to serve as offensive coordinator and assistant head coach this season, then take the reins of head coach in 2012.

But the relationship between the two men was strained, to say the least, and both had brought West Virginia some unwanted attention in the weeks leading up to the change. Stewart had been accused of trying to "dig up dirt" on Holgorsen and Holgorsen had been thrown out of a West Virginia casino for disorderly conduct in May.

Stewart himself was hired as an interim head coach, but after a huge victory over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl was promoted to full time head coach before the start of his first full season.

Should Withers acquit himself well early in the season, "interim" will be removed and he will become the first head coach of color for UNC football before the end of the season.

There is little question but that most Carolina fans will be hoping for that outcome, for with it will come a fairly successful season and the dawn of a new age for UNC football.

There is hope that this could yet turn out well for Carolina, whose student-athletes on the football team certainly deserve some good news for a change.