It wasn’t hard to spot Roy Williams during his first year of retirement.
He visited arenas across the country for games, including every step of North Carolina’s wild ride to the NCAA championship game against Kansas, a matchup of two programs he once coached. But he was cheering from ticketed seats instead of the sideline, a still-strange sight that helps illustrate the massive changes hitting men’s college basketball.
Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Jay Wright at Villanova have joined Williams in retirement in roughly 13 months, three Hall of Famers with 10 national championships and more than a century of coaching wisdom now out of the game. Players can now make endorsement deals for money and the transfer portal seemingly hums all the time now, adding more layers for coaches to manage in an already unrelenting 24/7 job.
