UNC wants to get its football coaching hire right, finally. History suggests it won’t
It’s all true, what a lot of people say about the football head coaching job at North Carolina — open, again, after the school’s firing of Mack Brown. It’s a position rife with potential. There’s no reason — in the big-picture, “anything is possible” sort of thinking — why the Tar Heels can’t become a national contender.
It’s a great school. Beautiful campus. Desirable place to live. North Carolina is among the country’s fastest-growing states, too, and becoming home to more and more talented high school prospects.
All true. All of it.
And yet here’s the rub: If UNC’s head coaching job were as great as everyone says it is every time it comes open, why hasn’t anyone ever maximized the Tar Heels’ supposed football potential in any kind of sustained way?
The old cliche, the origins of which are sketchy and debatable, is that UNC is a football “sleeping giant.” And maybe it made sense to make such a claim 30 years ago. Now, though, it just sounds absurd. UNC isn’t some dormant power in waiting. To use another tired phrase, UNC simply is what it is in football: mediocre, with the chance for more or less in any given season.
That, by the way, describes a lot of programs in power conferences. Is Virginia a sleeping giant? Is Kentucky? Is Maryland or Purdue? Is South Carolina? What about N.C. State?
The Wolfpack after its 35-30 victory against Carolina on Saturday has now won four straight against UNC. State is 16-9 in the rivalry since 2000. And if someone asked you which school had more ACC football championships, State or Carolina, what would be your answer? Hint: It’s not UNC. And yet, nobody ever describes N.C. State football as some power-to-be. There’s no fawning over the possibilities.
Why is it, then, that UNC always receives such treatment?
Here are the facts: Carolina has not won the ACC since 1980. In the past 25 years, it has finished as a ranked team exactly twice. Depending on what happens in its bowl game, UNC could suffer its ninth losing season since 2000. There have been a parade of coaches since Mack Brown’s first tenure — Carl Torbush to John Bunting to Butch Davis to Larry Fedora, and back to Brown — and none of them, not one, has come close to turning UNC into some kind of regular national contender.
The hope persists, of course. It always does.
But here’s another fact: a coaching change is always as much about perpetuating that hope, and getting people excited and believing again, as it is about anything else. Sure, schools always want to find a winner. But maybe even more than that, they want to sell tickets and inspire boosters to donate more money. And now, schools need to fund those NIL collectives, too (in an indirect, independent way, of course).
When you don’t win enough — and UNC didn’t during Brown’s second tenure — fan passion starts to wane. Attendance becomes more spotty. Tickets become tougher to sell. Donations aren’t as prevalent. Indeed, the money starts to dry up. Which is why any coaching change is as much about what’s happening off the field as it is on the field.
In both areas, Brown’s second tenure had run its course. The Tar Heels had made a habit of late-season swoons, confounding losses (James Madison, anyone?) and losing against N.C. State. Some of the outcry on social media and in certain corners of the Internet, though, became a little puzzling the louder and meaner it became.
Because what, exactly, do these disgruntled fans think UNC has ever been in football?
This isn’t Florida State suffering through a miserable (yet deserved) season, a year after its snub from the College Football Playoff. This isn’t Nebraska fans wondering when, or if, their once-celebrated and dominant program will ever return to its glorious heyday. This is UNC, which has two fewer ACC championships than Duke and N.C. State and four fewer than Maryland, which hasn’t even been in the conference for a decade now.
Outside of a brief stretch in the early 1980s under Dick Crum and that mid-1990s rise under Brown, during his first tenure, the Tar Heels have never really amounted to much of anything in football. Harsh, maybe, but true. Is it possible that whomever the school hires this time around — whether it’s Jon Sumrall or Glenn Schumann or whomever else — finally delivers UNC to national football prominence?
Sure. A lot of things are possible. As you’re reading this, high-powered satellites are zooming around the Earth at incredible speed. We’re all carrying tiny supercomputers around in our pockets all day. N.C. State even won the ACC in men’s basketball last March, and reached the Final Four.
Anything’s possible.
But it’s probably more likely that we’re having this same exact conversation in another six or seven years, when the promise of the new guy gives way to the likelihood that, no, it’s not going to happen under him, either. And round and round the cycle goes: excitement, hope, disappointment, despair, coaching change; excitement, hope, disappointment, despair, coaching change.
Again and again, over and over.
It’s only been happening this way at Carolina, in football, since pretty much forever.
ONE BIG THING
In this space this time a week ago, we posed the question of what UNC was going to do about Brown, who had offered no indication that he was ready to walk away. On Tuesday, UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham made the decision for him. Credit Brown, at least, for restoring some life to the program and bringing back some energy, at least early in his return. But the results weren’t there. The momentum was gone. And UNC did what was necessary.
The final numbers in Brown’s 16 seasons at UNC: a record of 113-79-1. Five seasons that ended in the top 25 (four of those coming in his first tenure). Four bowl wins. He came as close as anyone to delivering on the supposed promise of UNC football.
THREE TO LIKE
1. Dave Doeren’s appreciation of the rivalry.
Doeren said it best himself after his team’s victory in Chapel Hill Saturday: nobody hired him to go 6-6 and to barely squeak into a bowl game. But beating UNC? Yes — that’s always been a part of the job description. Doeren deserves the criticism for a season gone sideways. The Wolfpack, outside of Florida State, was probably the ACC’s most disappointing team. And still: it beat UNC. Doeren understands the importance of doing that. He values it. He emphasizes it. All good things. You want rivalries to matter, and State-Carolina matters a lot to Doeren, who’s now 8-4 vs. UNC.
2. Duke finds a way in Winston.
Good teams find ways to win. Bad teams find ways to lose. That sort of sums things up for Duke and Wake Forest this season. The Demon Deacons led 17-3 with nine minutes left in the third quarter. You’d think they’d be in good shape, right? Well. The Blue Devils exceeded all expectations in Manny Diaz’s first season, and Maalik Murphy’s game-winning 39-yard touchdown pass to Jordan Moore in Winston-Salem was like a cherry on top. Now the Blue Devils can win their 10th game with a bowl victory. Who would’ve thought?
3. A poetic ACC championship game.
Poor Miami. Just when it looked like the Hurricanes were in position to win the ACC for the first time ever (!), they gagged. Miami’s loss, though, was SMU’s gain — and it results in kind of a poetic ACC title game between Clemson and the Mustangs. One of those schools is attempting to sue its way out of the conference over greed and money. The other is so happy to be an ACC member, it agreed not to accept any conference revenue for seven years. We try not to play favorites here but, well, there’s no denying which team will be the sentimental favorite in Charlotte.
THREE TO ... NOT LIKE AS MUCH
1. The discontent over the timing of Mack Brown’s firing.
Look, we get it. Nobody wanted to see Mack Brown’s head coaching tenure come to an ugly end. He’s likable. He has handled himself with class. He has been something of an elder statesman in college football, and for a long time. Brown, though, was given the chance to resign on his own terms. He declined. That’s his choice — but then he basically doubled down and went public with his plan to return. That put Bubba Cunningham in an awkward position. Brown bluffed. Cunningham called it. And the result was the sort of ending nobody wanted to see.
2. Flag-planting nonsense.
Enough already with rivalry games ending with a victorious visiting team rushing to plant its flag at midfield, on the losing team’s home logo. Act like you’ve been there before. And in the case of Michigan (at Ohio State) and N.C. State (at UNC), those teams had been there before. The flag-planting stuff is silly. It creates hostility. It’s an act begging for retaliation, and a fight. Just stop. Not to mention, Wolfpack, that UNC’s Kenan Stadium does not have a natural grass field. So you can’t even really plant a flag into plastic. A school with a great field turf program should know this.
3. Supposed SEC superiority.
On the one hand, it was a bad weekend for the ACC in its rivalry games against SEC opponents. Only Louisville, against Kentucky, emerged victorious. But on the other hand, Georgia Tech’s eight-overtime defeat against Georgia felt like a win, at least, for a conference that continues to struggle for national respect. Mighty Georgia, the thought went, merely had to show up against the Yellow Jackets. Well, how’d that work out? In truth, Georgia Tech really deserved to win. The ‘Dawgs got lucky. And most satisfying of all, the SEC was exposed. It’s a very good league, as usual. Is it so much better than everyone else? No. It is not. Not this year, anyway.
CAROLINAS RANKING
1. South Carolina (no three-loss SEC team deserves to make the playoff but Gamecocks would be most deserving); 2. Clemson (a win-and-in scenario for the Tigers in the ACC title game, as it pertains to the playoff); 3. Duke (did you see the state championship trophy the Blue Devils celebrated with on Saturday? It looked home made, but nobody’s judging); 4. N.C. State (6-6 with a win over UNC is better than 7-5 with a loss against Carolina); 5. North Carolina (a rivalry loss that was symbolic of Mack 2.0); 6. Wake Forest (time for a bit of a program reset); 7. ECU (Pirates will be bowl bound after a mid-season coaching change, at least); 8. Coastal Carolina; 9. Appalachian State (Mountaineers could be at a crossroads with head coach Shawn Clark); 10. Charlotte.
FINAL THOUGHTS, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
•I think in college football coaching searches, as in life, we tend to over-complicate things sometimes. If Tulane’s Jon Sumrall wants the UNC job — and why wouldn’t he, really? — UNC should keep it simple and hire him. Nobody is a sure thing. Sumrall checks more boxes than pretty much anyone, though.
•I think Doeren and N.C. State had to have learned some important lessons this season. Among them: less emphasis and reliance on the transfer portal and more on developing guys already in your program. Doeren’s best teams have reflected that approach. The portal and NIL are important these days but State would be wise to go back to its roots.
•I think the future looks pretty good at State and Duke if they can keep their young quarterbacks around. But what is going to be the price for Maalik Murphy and CJ Bailey? We’re in a college athletics world in which both players would command a nice payday on the open market. How much of a payday, exactly? It’s hard to know. But they’ll be in demand. Do they stay or go?
•I think the good-but-not-great turnout at Kenan Stadium for Mack Brown’s farewell spoke to the broader challenges of building a football culture at UNC. There’s a subset of fans who are very passionate about trying to become great at the sport. But only a subset. And for a variety of reasons, widespread fan support is not happening without sustained success.
•I think I’d give North Carolina, the state, about a B-minus in college football this season. Duke was the only team to exceed expectations. State and Carolina fought mediocrity, and discontent. None of App State or Charlotte or ECU challenged for their conference championships. It wasn’t a total letdown but it wasn’t all that memorable, either. Until next year.
