Skip Holtz is only 13-10 in his nearly two seasons at USF, so you wouldn't have thought he would draw much interest when the annual college football coaching carousel started up recently. But several sources, including a tweet from Yahoo! Sports's impeccable Charles Robinson and Saturday's edition of the Charlotte Observer, have linked Holtz to the North Carolina job.
↵We'll have a lot more about this on Voodoo Five later today, but this rumor does pass the smell test. UNC can offer more money, a more stable conference, an arguably better job (only arguable because of the impending NCAA sanctions) and better resources (even though it's a basketball school). It gets Holtz back to the Carolinas, where he was an assistant and head coach for 11 years, and reopens all his old recruiting ties there. And the new athletic director in Chapel Hill, Bubba Cunningham, is a former classmate at Notre Dame and longtime friend of the USF coach. Even if the Tar Heels get hit hard by the NCAA in a few weeks, you can understand why the job could hold a lot of appeal to Skip Holtz, if not to everybody.
↵It remains to be seen how USF reacts to these rumors, or if they react at all. If Skip really is interested in leaving, what might have to happen to get him to change his mind? A contract extension would probably be out of the question -- with that record, you can't make a case that he's earned one. What else could there be?