Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium, Tommy Lloyd and Dusty May will shake hands at halfcourt before the second national semifinal tips off. Arizona-Michigan is a 1-vs-1 matchup between two of the three best teams college basketball produced this season, a game worthy of a national championship by itself. It will also be a two-hour live audition for the most important job opening in the sport, conducted in front of 70,000 witnesses who may not fully appreciate what they're watching.

North Carolina needs a basketball coach. Its top target is coaching Arizona in the Final Four. Its second choice is coaching Michigan. And the betting favorite to get the job is sitting in his Chicago living room, not coaching basketball at all because the Bulls missed the playoffs three weeks ago. If you designed a coaching search to maximize dramatic irony, you couldn't beat this.

The Tar Heels have been without a head coach since March 25, when chancellor Lee Roberts and outgoing athletic director Bubba Cunningham fired Hubert Davis five days after the most humiliating loss in program history — a 19-point blown lead to VCU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the largest first-round collapse the sport has ever recorded. Since then, Brad Stevens removed himself from consideration in under 12 hours, Nate Oats' buyout dropped from $18 million to $10 million and nobody cared because he'd already told everyone he was staying, and Tommy Lloyd told a room full of reporters that Arizona would have "another good coach after me" before spending three days insisting he didn't mean what everyone thinks he meant.

Eight Days That Shrank a Universe

The search began with a long list. It ended with a short one, and the speed of that contraction tells you everything about where college basketball's economics have landed in 2026.

Within hours of the Davis firing, Cunningham and his soon-to-be successor Steve Newmark — a former NASCAR executive and Chapel Hill native who officially takes the AD chair on July 1 — activated the search firm Turnkey ZRG and assembled an advisory panel of former players, coaches, and donors. The UNC System president must give written approval on any coaching contract before the Board of Trustees even sees it, a procedural guardrail installed after the Bill Belichick football hiring fiasco created a governance crisis just months earlier. This coaching search would be run by the book, even if the book was being rewritten in real time.

Brad Stevens was the first name crossed off — and the fastest. Before most Carolina fans had finished processing the Davis firing, the Celtics' president of basketball operations made clear he had zero interest in returning to coaching. Stevens had been the fantasy candidate, the Butler miracle worker who could bridge the gap between Carolina's old-school values and modern basketball's transfer-portal chaos. His refusal stripped the search of its safest option and forced Cunningham into more complicated waters. T.J. Otzelberger at Iowa State deflected during Sweet 16 media availability. Florida's Todd Golden carries a $16 million buyout that makes the conversation theoretical. One by one, the field winnowed until three names remained at the top of every list: Tommy Lloyd, Billy Donovan, and Dusty May.

Lloyd Already Said Goodbye

Tommy Lloyd spent twenty years in Mark Few's shadow at Gonzaga, building a reputation as one of the sport's premier recruiters and tacticians while never actually running his own program. When Arizona hired him in 2021 at age 46, it was considered a gamble. Nobody's calling it that anymore. His 148-35 record in five seasons represents the best start by any head coach in Division I history. He has taken the Wildcats to the Sweet 16 in four of those five seasons, won the Sporting News Coach of the Year award, and delivered Arizona's first Final Four appearance in 25 years. The man earned $4.4 million this season. He might be worth four times that on the open market.

The problem for Arizona is that Lloyd keeps saying things that sound like goodbyes. After the Wildcats dismantled Purdue 79-64 in the Elite Eight — a genuinely dominant performance against a team that entered the game as a popular title pick — Lloyd stepped to the podium and delivered nine words that turned the coaching carousel upside down: "Arizona's going to have another good coach after me, I promise you." He continued: "The sun may be shining on this team, and me coaching it right now. But when it's shining on you, you got to fight like hell to protect it and build it. So that's what I feel like my number one responsibility is — to fight to protect the program and fight to build it, for those who came before me and for those that are going to follow after me."

Three days later, standing in Tucson before his team boarded a flight to Indianapolis, Lloyd offered a clarification that only deepened the speculation: "It's absolutely true. There's gonna be another coach. This is a great program. I didn't say when." He followed that with a forceful denial — "People are going to speculate all they want. Guys, this team has my full focus. Nothing, nothing — I promise you, nothing — is knocking me off that path" — but by then the damage was done. Arizona fans had parsed every syllable. UNC message boards had already started planning welcome rallies.

The financial picture makes the smoke harder to dismiss. Lloyd's buyout dropped from $11 million to $9 million on April 1, and multiple sources have reported tension between Lloyd and the athletic department over program funding. In an era where championship-caliber rosters require roughly $10 million in NIL commitments, Arizona's willingness to meet that number remains an open question that Chapel Hill's checkbook could answer emphatically. AD Desiree Reed-Francois has stated she wants Lloyd to "retire a Wildcat" and confirmed extension talks, but wanting and paying are different verbs. Lloyd previously turned down Villanova's pursuit last year. He didn't leave for Villanova. North Carolina is not Villanova.

Insider Jeff Goodman reported that Lloyd is "the guy at the top of the list." An SI analysis identified three signs pointing to the hire: Lloyd's own comments, UNC's decision to pause Dean Smith Center renovation discussions to prioritize the coaching search, and the strategic timing of the process — North Carolina is deliberately waiting for Arizona's tournament run to conclude before making its move.

Donovan Hasn't Said No. That's the Whole Point.

Billy Donovan is the betting favorite to land in Chapel Hill, and the logic is straightforward: he's the best available coach in America with no buyout, no tournament run to interrupt, and two national championship rings already in his pocket. At 60, Donovan has spent 11 years coaching in the NBA after a legendary 19-season run at Florida that produced back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007, six SEC regular-season championships, and four Final Four appearances. He is a Hall of Fame-caliber coach who hasn't coached a college game since 2015. That gap is both his greatest selling point and his biggest question mark.

When reporters asked Donovan about the UNC opening before a Bulls game last week, he delivered the kind of non-denial that sent prediction markets into overdrive. "My main focus is on these guys and this new team," he said. "I understand that there's stuff out there, and I understand that there is going to be certain speculation." He did not say he wasn't interested. He did not say he was committed to Chicago long-term. He did not say anything that would close the door, and in a coaching search this high-profile, what you don't say matters far more than what you do. Sources told ClutchPoints he would "seriously consider" the position if formally offered.

The counterargument writes itself. Donovan hasn't recruited a high school player since 2015. The transfer portal didn't exist when he left Florida. NIL wasn't a concept. The entire infrastructure of college basketball has been rebuilt from the studs out, and Donovan would be learning a new sport while trying to coach an old one. Carolina fans want someone who can assemble a roster through the portal in approximately 72 hours. Donovan's Rolodex is full of NBA general managers, not AAU coaches and NIL collectives. On Kalshi, his odds sit at 42 percent — eight points above Lloyd's 34 — because the market is pricing in the cleanest deal, not necessarily the best fit.

May Won't Leave. Oats Can't.

Dusty May has done something at Michigan that borders on the absurd. He took over an 8-24 program two years ago and turned it into a 29-2 juggernaut that won a Big Ten-record 19 conference games and earned a No. 1 seed in the tournament. His 60-13 record since arriving in Ann Arbor is historically rare, and the fact that he's coaching Saturday's other semifinal — his Wolverines face Lloyd's Wildcats in what amounts to a head-to-head audition for the Chapel Hill job — would make for irresistible narrative symmetry if he actually wanted to leave.

He does not. "I'm incredibly happy at Michigan," May told reporters. "We love Ann Arbor. This place has been great to us, it's made us feel like home." Michigan AD Warde Manuel has been working for weeks on a contract extension, and multiple reports indicate the two sides are close to a deal. May's buyout sits at $7.5 million — manageable for North Carolina — but the financial obstacle matters less than the emotional one. May found a home. He isn't looking for another one.

Nate Oats presents a different kind of impossibility: economics crossed with stubbornness. Alabama's coach saw his buyout drop from $18 million to $10 million on April 1, which theoretically put him in play for the first time. Oats anticipated the question and shut it down with the verbal equivalent of a deadbolt during his pre-Sweet 16 press conference. "I'm not a guy that's trying to always jump around," he said. "The grass is not always greener. I love Alabama. My girls love Alabama." Then, with the finality of a man who has rehearsed the answer: "To me, there's absolutely no reason to leave here. I haven't talked to anybody, nor do I plan on talking to anybody." When a coach invokes his daughters, he's not negotiating. He's closing a door.

April 7 Changes Everything

The transfer portal opens on Monday, April 7 — the same day as the national championship game. Every day without a head coach is a day that North Carolina cannot recruit through the portal, cannot retain players considering their options, and cannot prevent the kind of roster exodus that turns a one-year rebuild into a three-year project.

Caleb Wilson, UNC's 19.8-point scorer and consensus top-five NBA Draft pick, is gone regardless. Seth Trimble has exhausted his eligibility. But the players in between — the ones who could stay or go, the ones who need a reason to believe the program's direction is sound — are watching this coaching search with their bags half-packed. The longer it takes, the emptier the roster gets, and the harder the new coach's job becomes before he's even unpacked his office. This is why North Carolina paused discussions about the Dean Smith Center renovation last week. Arena projects can wait. The transfer portal cannot.

Two ADs, a Chancellor, and a Search Firm

North Carolina's power structure for this hire is unusually layered. Bubba Cunningham, the outgoing AD, is technically still in charge. Steve Newmark, the incoming AD with 15 years running RFK Racing in NASCAR, is technically an observer. Chancellor Lee Roberts — himself an interim appointee who won't become permanent until August — has oversight. Board of Trustees chairman Malcolm Turner has publicly pledged that the board will stay out of it. The UNC System president has veto power over any contract. And Turnkey ZRG, the search firm, is managing logistics for an advisory group of former players and coaches whose recommendations carry enormous informal weight.

In practice, this means the most consequential basketball hire since Frank McGuire arrived from St. John's in 1952 is being made by a lame-duck athletic director and his not-yet-installed successor, overseen by an interim chancellor, and subject to approval by a system president who implemented the current governance rules specifically because UNC's last major coaching hire went sideways. If you're Tommy Lloyd or Billy Donovan, the first question isn't about salary or facilities. It's about who, exactly, you'll be working for — and whether they'll still be there in two years.

After Monday

By Tuesday morning, April 7, one of two things will have happened. Tommy Lloyd will have either won or lost a national championship. If he lost Saturday night, North Carolina's window to hire him opens immediately — before the portal deadline devours whatever roster remains in Chapel Hill. If he won the whole thing on Monday, the dynamics shift entirely. A coach who just cut down the nets in Indianapolis has maximum leverage, and Arizona will throw every dollar it has at keeping him. Lloyd's own words suggest he's ready to move. His clarifications suggest he's not ready to say so. The distance between those two positions is exactly the width of a national championship trophy.

Billy Donovan, meanwhile, is watching the Final Four from outside the tournament entirely, which is either his greatest advantage or his biggest liability. He has no buyout, no contractual entanglements, and no game to prepare for. He could fly to Chapel Hill tomorrow and sign a contract by dinner. The fact that he hasn't tells you either that North Carolina hasn't formally offered — which seems likely, given the search's deference to the Final Four timeline — or that Donovan is waiting to see how Saturday night plays out before making his own calculation.

North Carolina hasn't hired a true outside coach since 1952. Seventy-four years of institutional memory, of coaching sons who became coaching fathers, of a family tree so deeply rooted that firing anyone felt like a betrayal — all of it ended on March 25 when Hubert Davis walked out of the Dean Smith Center for the last time. What replaces it will be decided in the next six days. The Final Four is just the opening act.