UNC 'Hat' has head for game

Any minute now, Larry Fedora could take a sip from the Old Well and tell his new fans that no water tastes like North Carolina water.

Or he'll vow to dislodge every stone while pursuing the Tar Heels' first ACC title since 1980. Or he'll simply promise to make things interesting, a practical first step for a program that just spent $70 million on stadium expansion but couldn't fill the seats during the NCAA vulture watch.

Instead of a household name, the Tar Heels hired a 49-year-old offensive master whose fourth Southern Mississippi team set the school record with 11 wins.

Instead of a suit, they hired a hat.

Fedora (who prefers a cap or visor) will arrive with a million ideas for activating Kenan Stadium's hideously gargantuan video boards. Southern Miss, bound for the Hawaii Bowl after trouncing unbeaten Houston 49-28, ranks 14th nationally in scoring (37.9 points a game) and 13th in total offense (471 yards per).

The champion Golden Eagles (11-2) sport an average scoring margin of 17 points against mostly Conference USA competition, with a 30-24 win over Virginia and losses to Marshall (6-6) and, curiously, Alabama-Birmingham (3-9).

Bubba Cunningham, the new Carolina athletics director, saw Fedora work from close range as the Tulsa boss. He knows what he's getting to a greater degree than the Chapel Hill establishment, which merely hopes Cunningham got it right.

These outcomes are impossible to predict. When ACC commissioner John Swofford occupied the Carolina executive suite, he tapped a fast-talking Tennessean from Tulane, one of America's least-fertile football wetlands.

Mack Brown bounced into the long-delayed press conference smiling and introducing his wife, who wore a full-length fur coat and chewed gum. Granola types gasped. This hardly looked like a marriage made in Chapel Hill heaven, but Brown turned a desultory operation into an 11-game winner ranked No. 4 before heading to Texas.

On Dick Baddour's watch, Carolina misfired three times — or four, if you count the bizarre weekend when Baddour shoved Carl Torbush aside and then unfired him on Monday. Torbush, Brown's defensive coordinator and the fallback choice when Jim Donnan said no, was followed by former linebacker John Bunting, the desperation choice when Frank Beamer walked away from a handshake agreement.

Bunting, an astute and principled alumnus, didn't have top-division experience, regional recruiting ties or the right staff.

Frustrated money guys then went out and snagged hardened pro Butch Davis, who promised the sun in exchange for the moon and a few cement mixers. Carolina, flying on wax wings with an agent's employee acting as Davis' co-pilot, melted into an ethical oblivion lined with fraudulent academic papers. The NCAA will rule on nine alleged major violations soon.

Once Chancellor Holden Thorp sufficiently increased his trustee support through board turnover, he gamely summoned the will to fire Davis. Thorp and Baddour promoted assistant Everett Withers, whose first interim mistake was awarding Davis a game ball.

Davis is an aloof suit. Fedora could become a comfortable hat if he maintains the talent flow.

He grew up in Texas — hometown A&M was among his suitors in recent days — and caught passes for Austin College, a small-enrollment, high-tuition school in Sherman Oaks that won the NAIA title his freshman season.

Fedora was an academic All-America who spent a season on the Austin staff and four years at Garland High before mentoring under Grant Teaff at Baylor and Fisher DeBerry at Air Force. His offense broke 43 school records at Middle Tennessee, which led to coordinator jobs at Florida and Oklahoma State.

He inherited the solid Southern Miss foundation poured by Jeff Bower (119-83-1), whose last 14 teams posted winning records. Fedora needed five consecutive wins at season's end to sustain the streak in 2008, finished 7-6 again in 2009, then improved to 8-5 and hit the jackpot this year.

Unless Fedora executes a Beamer U-turn, he will leave behind a team ranked No. 22 and a 159-pound punt blocker named Furious Bradley.

He will receive a big paycheck, a big office in a big stadium and a big reservoir of goodwill from a battered constituency, plus all the water he can drink.