By Steve Wilstein
The Associated Press

North Carolina sent a message to a lot of coaches by forcing out Matt Doherty: Watch your back with players and their parents.

In a season of scandals on other campuses, Doherty's crimes were his abrasive, in-your-face manner, his courtside histrionics and his locker room harangues, rather than any broken rules.

At North Carolina, that mattered.

"We want coaches who are tough and who have high demands, but whose toughness is coupled with love," chancellor James Moeser said. "That's what we're looking for in our athletic leaders."

In other words, Doherty wasn't close to being Dean Smith. He was, in truth, a lot more like Bob Knight.

The Tar Heels didn't have to press Doherty for his resignation. There was no player revolt, no NCAA investigation in the works. For all his screaming, there was no evidence that he ever hit his players or choked them.

"He's not that crazy," sophomore Jawad Williams said Wednesday, a day after Doherty's resignation.

Doherty set up his own demise by alienating some influential people at Chapel Hill - none more important than Smith - but it was several players and their parents who contributed most to his downfall. In meetings with the athletic director and dean of students, they complained about Doherty's demanding style and described his rants as abusive.

The players were frustrated, freshman Rashad McCants said, going to practice every day saying, "Man, we've got to deal with this guy."

Though North Carolina's chancellor and athletic director insist that the decision had nothing to do with wins and losses, there's little doubt Doherty would still be coaching the Tar Heels if they had won a few more games and made the NCAA tournament.

If they were playing in the Final Four this weekend, nobody in Chapel Hill would have been complaining out loud about his temper, his indelicate language, his firing of assistant coaches and secretaries.

Doherty's record, 19-16 this season and 53-43 in three years, wasn't terrible but it was poor enough to make him vulnerable to anyone looking for an excuse to push him out. And there was no shortage of those at a school that had been much more comfortable under the genteel guidance of Smith and his longtime assistant and successor, Bill Guthridge.

Doherty rode high as the national coach of the year in his first season two years ago, leading the Tar Heels to a 26-7 record, and hardly a peep was heard about how tough he was on players. Then they tumbled to 8-20 last year and the grumbling began in earnest.

The tension kept mounting and he would have been gone sooner or later. Moeser and athletic director Dick Baddour said they had been watching Doherty for a couple of years, in a sense building a case against him.

"It is undeniable there has been some turmoil regarding the status of the players in the program for some time," Baddour said. "Coach Doherty worked hard to get beyond that turmoil and at times was successful."

But Doherty couldn't or wouldn't change his style and he finally resigned under pressure Tuesday with three years left on his contract.

Even as a member of the Carolina family, a starter for the 1982 NCAA championship team, Doherty turned out to be a bad fit as the coach in Chapel Hill.

He made the mistake, early on and often, of ticking off Smith and angering his legion of loyalists. It was more than just Doherty's dismissal of assistants, particularly the popular Phil Ford, or the treatment of secretaries that bothered Smith. It was that players like Joe Forte, who left for the pros after his sophomore year against Smith's advice, were saying they couldn't tolerate Doherty. Smith moved his office and made himself scarce around Doherty.

Davidson coach Bob McKillop, who coached Doherty in high school in New York and hired him as an assistant with the Wildcats in 1989, says he's worried about players having too much influence on how a program is run.

"Clearly, players are different than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago," McKillop said. "Players are refusing to go into games in the NBA, players don't show up for practice. The players have set the tone at the highest level of the game and then it filters down to our game.

"Kids are being taught early," he added, "that commitment and loyalty are not qualities that will pay material dividends."

In a different time and at a different school, Doherty's methods wouldn't have caused a stir. If he had built up the reservoir of respect of, say, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, nobody would have said a word about his language.

But after just three years at North Carolina, his record shaky and his enemies entrenched, Doherty's style wouldn't stand.

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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein@ap.org