Butch Davis Compares NCAA Violations To Chinese Water Torture

Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: beleaguered UNC football coach Butch Davis.

There's been some unpleasantness with an agent and some of the players at UNC and a fairly well-regarded team has lost some of its players. Davis joined Joe Rose on WQAM in Miami to discuss the impressive performance the very short-handed Tar Heels put together against LSU, how much responsibility he personally takes for the current state of the program, and how his experience at Miami will benefit him in Chapel HIll.

On how responsible he feels for the situation at UNC: Obviously, when you are the head coach, you take on an awful lot of responsibility and you shoulder the responsibility that you are in charge of and things that can be fixed. I think from a big picture standpoint, we've done a lot of good things here at Carolina. Kids are graduating. We've had two bowl games with two consecutive winning seasons. There is a lot more right at Carolina than there is wrong.

On how UNC was able to come back and have a chance against LSU: You have to give a lot of credit to the kids and the assistant coaches. They did a hell of a job preparing to and believing they could win the game. When you said it was without half the guys, I wish it was just half the guys. We were playing pretty much with a lot of young, inexperienced guys on defense. The biggest toll that that game took was the fact that all the sudden the guys that were starting on defense really depleted the special teams. I probably didn't do a good enough job preparing the rest of the kids to play on special teams. Our kids did great, stayed focused, each week try to get better with what we have on defense.

On if he knew it was going to be this bad: If you can believe this, I've actually had worse summers. As the review and the investigation by the NCAA started to unfold, you could tell that it was going to take some time and they were going to have to talk to a lot of guys and try to clarify. As you saw in the paper yesterday, we got a couple guys back. One of them is going to have to pay $450 in what the NCAA deemed as improper benefits. Another guy is going to have to pay, I think $500. Some of the guys you are going to find out when this comes out are going to have to repay acts for less than that as an extra benefit. It's been painfully slow just trying to get the clarification. It's like the Chinese water torture, just one drip at a time.

On if his experience rebuilding the Miami program helps him now with UNC: Clearly. Absolutely, Joe. When I referenced that, it's not just the NCAA sanctions, there were some unfortunate, tragic things that happened… There's been some years where some of those things were significantly more tragic and tougher to deal with than some of these things. Some of these things you would be remiss to put them in the same light.

This post, written by Paul Bessire, appears courtesy of Sports Radio Interviews. For the complete highlights of the interview, as well as audio, click here.

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