Mack Brown Unplugged: UNC coach on wearing masks, winning the Natty, Sam Howell’s praying
North Carolina football coach Mack Brown once turned the Tar Heels from a one-win team into a national title contender.
He was hired in Chapel Hill in 1987 to replace Dick Crum, whose teams had stumbled, producing one winning season in four years. After going 1-10 in 1988 and again in ’89, Brown’s teams began a steady climb, producing eight straight winning seasons.
Brown returned to the Tar Heels last seasons, years after eventually winning a national championship at Texas, being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and becoming an analyst for ESPN.
And in his second act, Brown is determined to take UNC places it has never been — and that includes getting past that juggernaut across the state line known as Dabo Swinney’s Clemson Tigers.
“How far are we from winning (an ACC) conference championship,” Brown said. “I really think it’s out there for us. Clemson’s a great team — they’re not a good team. Dabo’s done an unbelievable job, and that’s the goal for all of us (to beat Clemson). To get out of this league right now you’ve got to beat Clemson, and that’s really, really hard to do, but we’ve got to continue to keep recruiting. We’ve got to win the (ACC) Coastal (Division) before we can worry about Clemson.”
Brown appeared on the Charlotte Observer’s streaming high school sports talk show, “Talking Preps,” to discuss the state of Tar Heel football, how he’s handling the COVID-19 pandemic and recruiting.
Brown has lined up a phenomenal recruiting class among players who will be seniors in the 2020-21 school year. Recruiting website 247Sports ranks the UNC class third in the nation behind Ohio State and Tennessee, but ahead of Clemson and Southern Cal. In a wide-ranging interview where he was engaged, funny and open, Brown discussed chasing Swinney, who he would compare quarterback Sam Howell to and the need to celebrate front-line workers during the pandemic.
But he often came back to his biggest goals for his second run as coach in Chapel Hill. He wants to win bigger than any coach there, including Brown himself, has ever won. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Is winning a national title more realistic now than it was during your first run?
MB: “We don’t play Clemson for awhile again unless it would be for the conference championship,” Brown said. “But unlike the last time we were here in ’97, when we were No. 4 and we were playing Florida State, who was No. 1…even if we had beaten Florida State, I’m not sure we would’ve gotten to the BCS because our league wasn’t as strong. It’s one of the reasons I left. Now we have a clear path to the playoffs. You win the ACC, you’re going to be in the playoffs and if you’re in the playoffs, you have a chance to win the national championship. Nobody takes lightly how good Clemson is, and everything you do, you try to put yourself in position to win your division championship, your conference championship and then win the national championship. That’s what we came back to do. We’ve done it. In fact, I’ve said we won one at Texas and lost three. I understand how to do both of those. I’d rather win. They’re more fun, but that’s our goal and that’s where we’re headed.”
What has life been like for you during this pandemic?
Mack Brown: “What an awful thing that this many people have been sick and this many people have lost their lives and millions of people have lost their jobs and there’s a lot of hungry people out there. It’s just an awful thing at this time. It’s been very unique. We’ll learn a lot of great things form this. As terrible as it is, we’re all learning to communicate better. We’re communicating with our boosters, our season-ticket holders better. We’re communicating with our team. Our staff meetings are on Zoom. We’re having high school coaching clinics and they’ve been wonderful. Probably when we get through with this stuff, we’re going to do things differently than we did before just because of what we’ve learned.
As an older coach, do you have any concerns coaching in COVID-19 without a vaccine?
MB: “We are lucky in Chapel Hill to have the most brilliant medical people anywhere in the country. If they are going to have our players back on campus and if they’re going to have our coaches back on campus and allow us to coach and play, they’re gonna make sure we’re safe. I’m in good shape. I’m being careful. I’m doing everything the guidelines tell me to. I wash my hands 25 times a day, I think. I’m putting sanitizer on them all the time. I’m being careful with social distancing. I’m wearing a mask when I’m supposed to. But there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered.”
What are the biggest changes you think you’ll deal with when you come back?
MB: “At our staff meeting (Monday) morning, I said, ‘OK, when we come back to work, is everybody going to be comfortable? If somebody’s not, you need to tell me. ... How do we do our meetings now? Do we wear a mask at work? Do you take your mask off when you’re in your own office? When you go down the hall, do put your mask on? When we’re in staff meetings, our players meetings, do we have a mask on? Do we coach with a mask? Do we test each other and the players every day or every three days? Do we check temperature every day? How do we dress in the dressing room with social distancing? So there’s many things that have to be answered ... .But we’re not one of those teams that’s coming back in in June. We’re going to be slow. We’re going to be very deliberate and by the time that Bubba Cunningham, our athletic director, and our Chancellor allows us to come back, we’re going to know what’s going on and I feel very very comfortable about that.”
How excited are you about this class of 2021? And do you feel like you’re beginning to put a fence around the state (UNC has commitments from eight of the state’s top 20 players, including five of the top 10).
MB: “That was our plan. We felt like there’s great players in this state and when you have a year where you might not have a player at a certain position, you’ve got from D.C. to Atlanta, which is a tremendous footprint — and you look at the number of NFL players that come from that group of states, it’s very representative of great football. And we’ll go to Florida and get a guy that has a tie or a great academic record. We may go into Tennessee or Alabama. We can jump out of our footprint, but by and large, we’re going to be a team made up of the best players from North Carolina, and if we find a guy better in Georgia that year, then we’ll take him, so our out-of-state payers will be really good as well.
“Last year at this time we were selling hope. We are hoping fans would come. We would hope we win some games. We would hope our facilities would improve. Now we can sell facts. We have a chance to win every game. We are recruiting really well. We’ve redone our complete facility; 92 percent of our season tickets have been renewed. We’re at a really great place moving forward and I’m really excited for it.”
So you think you can build a national champion with home-grown talent?
MB: “I do. I think more now than when I was here before. There’s a lot more players now, especially in Charlotte, than there were when we were here before. Charlotte was not a hotbed of high school football players. You might get one or two out of there. ... We were worried about (the 2022 class), not the ’21 class. We feel like that may be the best class of players in this state that we’ve ever seen. But next year’s class we didn’t think there were as many. Well, after having our virtual spring recruiting and taking to every coach in the state, we found 100-plus guys that we’re going evaluate in the fall. There’s a lot of players in this state I think that are under-recruited in some cases simply because maybe it’s a smaller school or maybe a different part of the state that’s not very populated and a lot of coaches are not going to go there. They’ll go to Greensboro. They’ll go to Charlotte. But they’re not going to go to a small town in eastern North Carolina, and we may find a guy that’s really a good football player that isn’t as highly recruited simply because he’s hard to get to.”
How important is the Charlotte-area for North Carolina recruiting?
MB: “It’s grown so much, and whether you get to Gastonia or Shelby, just the whole metropolitan area. If we aren’t successful recruiting that area, we’re not going to make it. We won’t be as highly successful at North Carolina as we want to be. That is a critical area for us and there are so many great players and they’re all buddies and they’ve played against each other for years. When you start getting them, they want their buddies to come and they’ll recruit the others. That’s why we have to continue to do the great job we’re doing in Charlotte now.”
How has recruiting changed now versus your first go round at UNC?
MB: “I think I have a better feel of when to get out of a player if he’s not interested in us. You’d rather be fifth than second, because if you wait until the end, and he’s not coming, you not only lose him but you probably lose the other two you were recruiting at that position because you waited too late. So I ask a lot more direct questions than I did before. The staff suggests who we offer and I make those decisions now and I thought even at Texas, at the end, we probably took some guys off video and I didn’t meet them all in person and we didn’t watch them all in person. We want see these guys in person. I’m not going to offer and take a guy at North Carolina that I don’t meet. And if I don’t like him, I’m not taking him.”
How good can Sam Howell become?
MB: “When I first saw him in high school, some people compared him to Baker Mayfield, (who) had just won the Heisman, so that’s a good comparison and I see that comparison. But for the ones I’ve coached, he’s more like Colt McCoy because he’s so accurate. ... Sam is a worker. He had over a 3.0 his first year at UNC. He has absolutely no hobbies. He is in that building every day studying every minute detail about football. ... He’s got tremendous faith. I was trying to find him one Sunday morning and he texted me and said, ‘Coach, I’m in church, can I call you right after i get out?’ I said, ‘That’s good. I’ll let you pray before you come back to me.’”
This story was originally published May 19, 2020 at 3:53 PM.
