Brown’s UNC return makes sense
Coach back on sideline at 67 after five years in TV broadcast booth
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Walking into Mack Brown’s office at North Carolina is a museum-like experience. On the center table is a display box full of rings that chart the course of Brown’s career from his first stint in Chapel Hill to his championship legacy at Texas. On the walls are pictures of Brown with celebrities, former players and three U.S. presidents, while his trophy case displays a particularly notable crystal football that was once broken by the family member of a recruit.
A lifetime of success in coaching, culminating with winning that 2005 national title in arguably the greatest college football game played, has given Brown plenty of nostalgia to surround himself in his second go-round at UNC.
It’s also that very notion of looking to the past that initially made me skeptical when athletics director Bubba Cunningham decided to bring 67-year-old Brown out of the broadcast booth five seasons removed from when he coached his last game at Texas.
Shouldn’t a place like North Carolina that is forever striving to make good on its football potential be looking to hire the next prototype of a young Mack Brown from the late 1980s rather than the one who ran out of gas after 30 straight years as a head coach?
Likewise, after everything Brown had accomplished and all of the money he’d made, why would he want this again with the stress, the long hours and the arduous work of turning around a program that has won five games over the last two seasons under Larry Fedora?
None of that made sense to me, at least until I spent an hour listening to Brown explain it, which is ultimately why he’s going to win at North Carolina. If he can convince even some of the biggest skeptics who watched the disastrous end of his tenure at Texas that he’s still got some juice left in him, one of the greatest salesmen of all time in college sports can certainly convince 16- and 17year-olds.
“When I talked to him about this job, there wasn’t one ounce that felt like this was the going back home again tour,” said Jay Bateman, the firebrand defensive coordinator Brown hired from Army. “He wants to win. He’s made that very clear.”
The plan to do that is pretty straightforward. Brown is going to recruit regionally and even nationally because his name still resonates from his time on ESPN, but the focus is on re-creating the formula from the mid-1990s when he got most of the best players from North Carolina and built top-10 teams his last two years before going to Texas.
Though many years have passed, Brown still has a network of relationships in high schools across the state and has doubled down on it by reuniting with Tim Brewster, who was his top recruiter the first time at UNC, and hiring Dré Bly, who was an All-American cornerback under Brown and is deeply connected with high school programs in Charlotte.
So far, it seems to be working. Days after getting the job, Brown secured the commitments of two four-star players from the state to salvage the 2019 recruiting class and has seen some strong returns in 2020 including three four-star commitments on defense.
But ultimately, to be convinced this is going to work, you need to be convinced about why Brown is doing this when the easier path would have been to do television for four months a year and spend the rest enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of work.
Like he has for decades with topics he’ll get asked about over and over again, Brown has crafted a tidy, folksy narrative around his comeback. It goes something like this: Though Brown had gotten calls about coaching jobs here or there over the last few years, he didn’t really expect to coach again because his wife, Sally, would only go for it if she could live in Hawaii, the Bahamas or Chapel Hill.
“I said, ‘They don’t have football in the Bahamas,’ ” Brown said. “She said, ‘Well, you can start a team. I said, ‘Why Chapel Hill?’ She said, ‘I’m not starting over again. I’ll go where I know people.’ So I really didn’t think much about it and thought Larry has a long-term contract and I’m getting older and I don’t want Larry to not do well, so I was kind of through.”
But when you dig deeper with Brown, you realize he really wasn’t through at all.
Shortly before the 2013 season at Texas, I went to Austin to sit down with Brown, who was at a point where he needed to win big or be fired. After nine straight seasons of being among the nation’s elite programs, the Longhorns had tumbled to 5-7, 8-5 and 9-4 and questions were swirling about his recruiting approach, his staff hires and his hunger to demand a championship culture. Brown talked a big game, but ultimately he was fooling himself.
“I’m not going to be bitter when I get through,” Brown said over lunch that day.
In reality, he was already there. Brown had been enduring a lot of battles on a lot of fronts at Texas, a program that sits at the cross-currents of obnoxious wealth and craven political power and intensely unrealistic expectations relative to history.
In the locker room at the Rose Bowl after beating Southern California and finally winning his national championship, Brown famously concluded his victory speech by telling his players, “When you’re 54, I don’t want you to say winning a football game is the best thing that ever happened in my life.”
But by the end at Texas, Brown had become exactly what he warned against – consumed by the wins and losses, unable to keep perspective, disconnected from reality because of his manic desire to maintain rather than evolve.
Four years later in that same stadium, Brown had to give another speech after a national championship game, only this time after a loss to Alabama when his team fought its guts out to stay close despite quarterback Colt McCoy getting knocked out on the first drive.
Under the circumstances, Brown should have been happy and proud of what happened that night. Instead, all he could muster was some off-tone comments about how to handle the disappointment of being No. 2.
“You get so it’s about the wins, and it becomes your identity and you didn’t mean for it to and it’s not what you thought,” Brown said. “And somewhere in the process you’re still taking care of the kids and still coaching, but you’re so uptight with everyone all the time because if you don’t win you’re either losing who you are or you’re letting the state of Texas down and this thing gets too big.”
Brown didn’t even realize until later how much those years had worn him out, but at the same time retirement had left him with a hunger. Not so much for the wins or losses anymore, but for being in the living rooms and developing relationships with young people and mentoring coaches.
Sally remarked he was more excited and energized when he came back from a week in Manhattan, Kansas, talking football with Bill Snyder than from a month in the Bahamas.
“She said, ‘Your whole life you’ve gotten up with an agenda and goals of things to do, and half the year you’re getting up saying what are you going to do today?’ ” Brown said. “It sounds so awful because my life was so good, but that’s not me.”
Ultimately, though, merely wanting to do it again won’t be good enough, even if the expectations at North Carolina aren’t nearly as high at Texas.
Brown still knows how to run a program, and he still has that magnetic gift for remembering everyone’s name and looking them right in the eye and making them believe he is fully invested in everything they’re saying. That’s a useful thing to have for a football coach because it works on everyone from recruits to millionaire donors to journalists. In fact, it’s working right now.
But there is a plan here, and it’s a good one. Instead of leaning on his football roots or people he had worked with in some capacity, Brown took the advice of Kliff Kingsbury and Lincoln Riley and hired Phil Longo to run an Air Raid style offense. And on defense, he hired someone a lot of programs wanted in Bateman.
What that combination suggests is that Brown didn’t put this together haphazardly – he studied, he researched and he’s going to empower his coordinators to be cutting edge while he focuses on the big picture.
“Mack has the plan,” Longo said. “He’s teaching us the template and now we have to go out and execute. He knows how to fix it, and we’re going to get it done his way.”
It’s hard to know exactly what level of success that will translate into. But North Carolina has given Brown some additional resources, from a new indoor practice facility to getting better food at the training table. Everything’s in line for a happy ending.
“People snicker at it, but my goal is to win a national championship here,” Brown said. “It would be so cool and so fun.”
Who knows if that’s realistic at North Carolina, but Brown has a gift for making people believe it.
Because in the end, all of those trophies and rings in his office aren’t really about nostalgia. For Brown, they’re about the possibility that everything he’s done can be done again.