Brownlow's Twitter Mailbag: Who had the better debut, Scheyer or Davis?

By Lauren Brownlow, WRALSportsFan contributor

I asked for good questions, and yet again, you all have delivered. Did I make sure I only viewed your Mailbag tweets today so that I could stay within Twitter's rate limit and not get shut out of my account? Yes. But I made it work. We all did. Thank you.

And so this week, I'll get into who had the better coaching debut between Jon Scheyer and Hubert Davis, LaMelo Ball's max deal, possible ACC expansion and the best takeout.

Let's get into it!

I got quite a few questions that made me think, and this was one of them! There are some commonalities: both at least flirted with not making the NCAA Tournament (UNC a bit more, um, aggressively than Duke), both had trouble with inconsistent 3-point shooting and both struggled with some up-and-down play in the backcourt at times. Duke got its proverbial stuff together by mid-February and didn't lose a game again until the NCAA Tournament.

While UNC did win 11 of its final 13 regular-season games, that loss to Pitt at home (which finished 2022 ranked 195 in Ken Pom) was horrendous and enough of a head-scratcher to leave doubt about the Tar Heels. They did finish the season with the same number of regular-season losses as Duke, but no title.

Both had to tweak the way they used their personnel along the way to find success. Both Scheyer and Davis had the pressure of following legends, and that is nothing to sneeze at for either one. Especially for Scheyer, as he watched his mentor lose in painful fashion both his final home game and his final actual game to their archrival and a coach that was in the same position he would be in the next year.

But there are some important differences. Duke was a better defensive team all year than Carolina was. Duke won the ACC Tournament. But of course North Carolina beat Duke in the regular-season finale and then went on a run to the Final Four, knocking off three of Ken Pom's top 11 teams along the way before falling by 3 to Kansas in the title game.

It's not entirely fair because we have another year of data for Davis and we don't for Scheyer yet, but with a lot of the same players back last year, UNC wasn't able to recapture that magic. I'm trying not to let this year influence my evaluation of that year. But in a way, I'm almost more impressed with the job that Davis did the year before in getting a team whose closest loss to a Ken Pom top-15 team was by 9 and that had one win over a Ken Pom top-50 team before January 24 to go on the postseason run that it did.

Coaching in the NCAA Tournament with short turnarounds, potential matchup pitfalls and all kinds of other things you can't possibly predict or plan for (although you try to) is its own beast, and I'm sure Scheyer will do fine. Carolina didn't even make it to try this season, though, and Davis will have to get the regular season figured out.

I think they're both impressive for different reasons. I'm not judging UNC by this season as much, but in the postseason in 2022, Davis got that team to believe and put together consistent stretches of basketball in a way that we hadn't seen before or since. I think that postseason is the most impressed I've been by either coach if you isolated it. If you want me to judge them on the entirety of their seasons? It's Scheyer.

Davis has the best win of either coach with the win over Coach K in his last home game and the second best with the Final Four win. But Scheyer won his first two meetings with Carolina and got the team to coalesce down the stretch in a way that ensured they wouldn't even have to sweat Selection Sunday. And he has a title for his season (an ACC championship).

UNC has a Final Four banner to hang, sure, but it has plenty of those. While I marveled at how that UNC team looked like a completely different group that season, I also wondered where it had been all along.

I get why this question is being asked, and it sounds like a good idea on paper. But with USC and UCLA going to the Big 10, which team or teams from the PAC-12 would get ESPN to give the ACC more money? Maybe Oregon? It wouldn't be enough of a difference to make up the gap in revenue between the ACC and the SEC/Big Ten, and it would be another school to have to split revenues with, something no one in the league wants to do.

There's only one team the ACC could add that would incentivize ESPN to restructure the TV deal, and that's Notre Dame. That doesn't seem super likely. And with the layoffs at ESPN this weekend, it doesn't seem like the network is super flush with extra cash to hand out at the moment anyway.

I think it's fantastic. I can't speak for Charlotteans, but I can speak for myself as a lifelong North Carolinian: there is a part of all of us buried way down deep inside that is always afraid a dynamic star will leave us. We worry that we are the small market, podunk town that national media types sometimes paint us as in a professional context.

Why would anyone want to stay HERE? PLEASE LOVE US, STAR PLAYERS! PLEASE! It's part of why Cam Newton became so beloved. He genuinely loved (and still loves) the Charlotte area and gave back so much to it. When a truly great athlete not only is willing to play here but enthusiastically wants to, how great is that? But part of us always worries if we're enough, right? WELL YOU ARE ENOUGH! ALL OF YOU!

Selfishly, I have to choose one specific one that would have been much harder for me to COVER without Twitter, and that's the UNC-NC State 21-inning marathon in the ACC Tournament. I literally got myself through that game tweeting delirious nonsense and relishing all of the jokes you all were making and every now and then I would just laugh out loud to myself, like an insane person.

I do not know how I would have gotten through that marathon without knowing that all of you were suffering through it with me, simultaneously wanting it to be over and not wanting it to be. It was a strange time. And I wouldn't have gotten through it without you.

Having a kid influences literally all of these choices for me because he's got to eat wherever I go, too. Pizza is always the one I go to when I can't think of something else, but here are some of my favorites (in no particular order):

1. Cook-Out. Underrated and cheap, and you can actually get a lot of food for not a lot of money. So you can grab an extra wrap or something and save it for later. And the milkshakes keep for a few days.

2. Hibachi Sushi. It may not have the best hibachi in town. I don't really eat sushi, so I can't speak to that. But you know what it does have? ENORMOUS PORTIONS OF HIBACHI. And it is genuinely pretty good! Also, their white/pink sauce/whatever you want to call it is BANGIN. You can get a WHOLE lot of food for not very much money and literally have meals for like 3-4 days.

3. The Bojangles/Popeyes combo. As I've written before in this space, I prefer Popeyes' bone-in chicken to Bojangles'. But I also prefer Bojangles sides basically across the board. And so if I have time, and if I'm in the mood for fried chicken, I'll go get a 12-piece from Popeyes and then swing by Bojangles for some dirty rice, cajun fries and biscuits. You're welcome in advance.