By Jonathan Lidskin
Amid this season’s struggles and potentially missing the tournament for the third time in six seasons, North Carolina Men’s Basketball needed to make a change. This isn’t just a change that is as simple as adding a big man or deciding to play faster. UNC has decided to make an organizational change. The Tar Heels are trying to operate differently and catch up to the NIL era of college basketball. Their solution for that problem? Hiring Jim Tanner to be the team’s General Manager.
It’s no secret that college sports are way different than ever. This business is no longer just about player evaluation. It’s about monetary evaluation as well. There are plenty of opinions on Hubert Davis’ ability to coach basketball, but whether he can or not is irrelevant. What we do know is that Hubert Davis is not trained to evaluate a market economy which is essentially what the transfer portal has become. That isn’t a slight at Hubert Davis. No coaches are trained to do that. That’s where the role of Jim Tanner comes in.
Tanner has been an agent for a long time so he understands how markets for players work. He is the Founder and President of Tandem Sports + Entertainment and has represented many great players at the professional level over the years at both Tandem and other agencies. You can list off all of the clients you want to prove how successful Tanner has been, but one of the more important credentials for getting this job was that he studied at UNC making him part of the Carolina family.
There’s no doubt that it is easier than ever to rebuild a college basketball roster, but that doesn’t mean that Tanner’s job is easy. He will be helping to build a program with crazy high expectations. However, if you see UNC turn this thing around and get back to routinely having top 10 teams, you bet Tanner will have played a huge part in that.