Williams left after a decade by Smith’s side to take the job at Kansas in 1988. The Jayhawks had just won the national championship, but were about to be slapped with a tournament ban for recruiting violations under the previous coach, Larry Brown, who had left for the N.B.A.
Kansas became a perpetual national championship contender and did it with panache — a fast-breaking offense paired with a rugged defense that were melded through crisp, detailed practices that mirrored the discipline with which his teams played. He turned out plenty of N.B.A. players, though with the exception of Paul Pierce, no superstars.
A sign of the respect he engendered as one of basketball’s best coaches came when Jerry West, the architect of two Lakers dynasties, tried to lure him to Los Angeles. But Williams remained in Kansas for 15 seasons. He reached four Final Fours — splitting a pair of meetings with North Carolina — but a championship was elusive. His final game at Kansas came in a loss to Syracuse in the 2003 title game.
By then North Carolina had quickly slipped into disrepair.
When Smith retired in 1997, his longtime assistant Bill Guthridge was appointed as a replacement. Three years later, after persistent criticism (and two Final Four appearances), Guthridge retired. Williams was the obvious candidate, but he could not bring himself to leave Kansas. The job went to another for Tar Heel — Matt Doherty, who was such a mess that Smith quietly pushed for his ouster in 2003 after two seasons.
The question of whether Williams would turn down Carolina again hung over the Final Four.
After Kansas was upset by Syracuse in the title game, the television reporter Bonnie Bernstein asked him if he was leaving. “I could give a (bleep) about North Carolina right now,” Williams said in a live interview.
It was an uncharacteristically foul word from Williams’ mouth.
If he wanted to color his language, he often dropped “dadgum” into a sentence in his Blue Ridge twang. He did this so frequently, he picked up a nickname: “Dadgum Roy.”
It didn’t take Williams long to restore North Carolina to its station among college basketball royalty. In his second season, with players recruited by Doherty, the Tar Heels won a national title. They won two more championships, in 2009 and 2017 — and came agonizingly close to another, losing to Villanova in 2016 on Kris Jenkins’s long 3-pointer at the buzzer.
