Exclusive: One-on-one with UNC coach Mack Brown who enters 2020 with high expectations
In just a year, North Carolina football went from 2-9 to a team capable of competing for the ACC’s Coastal Division, again.
A huge reason for that is because of Mack Brown, who returned to coach UNC 22 years after his first stint with the program.
In Brown’s first year of his second stint, the Tar Heels finished the 2019 season 7-6, ending with a 55-13 victory over Temple in the Military Bowl. It was the Tar Heels’ first winning season in three years.
The Tar Heels did it with a freshman quarterback and a number of young, talented players they believe will be the key to sustaining long-term success.
Spring practice for the 2020 season begins on March 17. The Tar Heels will have 14 practices until their spring game on April 18.
Brown sat down with The News & Observer for a one-on-one interview on Thursday to talk about the 2019 season, the upcoming season and beyond.
The interview has been condensed for brevity:
How would you assess the 2019 season? Did it live up to your expectations?
It lived up to my expectation in the fact that we have a happier team right now than we had a year ago. We have a more confident team than we had a year ago. There is a true spirit right now with our fans and with recruiting, and expectations are high and that’s fun. So having your players happy, they trust us now, they didn’t know us a year ago, they are working so hard with Coach (Brian) Hess. This time last year, we had just hired him.
Our staff is staying pretty much intact, which is great after a year. Which means in a very short period of time, with a lot of demands, we were able to hire a really good staff that fit this place that’s going to stay. So I would say, we could have won 10, we could have won four. If somebody told me this, I wouldn’t have been happy with seven, but after looking at our team and the injuries we had on defense and the way everything happened, I’m really happy with where we are.
So what was the highest (number of wins) you envisioned finishing in that first year?
I’m a little bit weird in that area because I feel like I have to know that we’re going to win all the games. Because if we don’t, I think I’m cutting our staff and our team short. So to me, I actually go into the season not knowing who we were, thinking that it’s our job to put these guys in a position to win every game.
The good thing is we were in a position to win every game, we just didn’t finish some. And at Texas we finished so many games in the fourth quarter, we were one of the best in the country, that I was really disappointed in me and us as a staff that we couldn’t finish those games. So that’s what we’ve got to do...
We’ve got to do better on goal line, short yardage, red zone, on both sides of the ball. We’ve protected the ball so well, but we’ve got to get more takeaways on defense. We’ve got to do better in the kicking game. We were about sixth in the league. So we didn’t win any games in the kicking game so we’ve got to do better there. And we’ve got to create depth. With depth you have fewer injuries, you have better morale and you create better depth for the future. So when you lose somebody to graduation, you’ve got a guy that’s played and ready to go. I thought we got better the last three games because we got to play a lot more people.
Can you take me through what you remember from the Clemson game?
I’m always dreadfully honest with the players. So I told them early in the season, ‘I wouldn’t swap you for the Wake Forest players. I wouldn’t swap you for the Appalachian players. Then we got to Clemson, I said, ‘ehh, I’d probably take them.’ I said ‘you all might take Dabo (Swinney).’ But I said, ‘they have better players than we do. They have more confidence than we do. They’ve got more depth than we do. But it doesn’t mean we can’t be the best team on that day.’ I said ‘what we’ve got to do is be the best team Saturday. And quit worrying about who they are and how they’ve done. It’s about us. It’s not about them. ‘
And the other thing we said was ‘get it to the fourth quarter,’ and if we can get it to the fourth quarter in the game, then the pressure flips to them. So it happened like exactly like we wanted it to happen, and we just couldn’t finish it.
The (two-point conversion) play wasn’t bad, the execution just wasn’t good. So that’s the other thing you get into... But there was a minute and 16 seconds left. They had a timeout. We had five starters out on defense. I felt like if we kick the extra point, it took pressure off of them, because they are going to overtime at worse and they can drive down, kick the field goal and win the game.
I felt by going for two, they had to go down the field and win the game. It put tremendous pressure on them and they had already missed a field goal. So I felt like our best chance was to shorten the game because I didn’t want to go into overtime with all their power on offense and us being five short. We had lost (Myles) Wolfolk, we had lost Cam Kelly, and we had already lost Crawford in that game. We had already lost Patrice (Rene). So we were really short handed. And I didn’t think that was a fair fight for us going into overtime.
What was the biggest difference in coaching now compared to where you left off in 2013?
I think I’m better at details now. I had always thought I was good... If a young man is doing something that I really like, I’m going to go tell him, and I’m going to tell him in front of everybody. So everybody understands this is what we want. So I’m better at explaining to our coaches and our players exactly what I want. And I have a plan in place. I know what I want.
In the past some times, you’d listen to a coach and you’d say, ‘you know, that might work.’ Because he wanted to do it, you might give in to what you really believed in to let him have some say, but I’m not doing that anymore. If coach gives me a great example of something, I’ll use it. But I’m not making anybody feel good because they give me something that they like. I’m doing exactly what I feel like what we need to do to win.
I was talking to Dre (Bly) yesterday, my staff this morning, about after a year, how would the players look at me, because they didn’t know who I was a year ago and I would hope that they would look at me as being fun. Being tough and disciplined. Being fair, and consistent. And that’s who I would hope the staff and players would think I would be. And my goal is to make sure, the day that I do leave here, that everybody’s life is better. The coaches’ lives are better and they are in a better position moving forward and every young player has learned enough from us that they are better prepared for life when they get out of here.
And I also told the coaches — everybody says he’ll quit — I’ve already done that. I’ve played enough golf, I’ve fished enough. I know that’s not who I am. So as long as I’m healthy and this is working, I’m going to be doing it. There’s no end in sight.
Sam Howell had a huge year for you all, how do you set realistic expectations for him, and what are they?
The conversation I will have with Sam is that you did a great job, and you overcame so much adversity because we didn’t have an experienced backup for you, so we couldn’t run you, and you couldn’t get hurt. It limited so much of what you could do in this offense. So there is a big upside for him. And we saw some of that against Temple... because he can run the ball.
And the other expectation for him is the only stat that matters for a quarterback is win-loss. Nobody remembers how many touchdowns you threw or how many interceptions you threw. They’ll remember how many games you won. I can sit here right now, and I can’t tell you much about Vince Young, other than he was 30-2. I remember it like it was yesterday. Colt McCoy was the winningest quarterback in college football at one time. He was 45-7, I think. So I remember that, but I don’t remember their stats. So our guys will get a lot more rewards when we win more games.
And the other thing we’ve got to do is a establish a second-team quarterback. Because I lost a national championship game because Colt McCoy went down and we didn’t have Garrett Gilbert ready. So we’ve got to get Jace (Ruder) or Colby (Criswell) ready to go.
A lot of people have you all in their “way-too-early Top 25 team.” There will be a lot of expectations for this team. You will no longer be flying under the radar. How do you handle that?
Coach Swinney had won 30 straight games at Clemson and he played the underdog role all year. So you can make the thing work. The thing I like about where we are is last year we were having to tell recruits what we were going to do. Now we’ve shown them. I like a level of expectation to be high, because it makes me work harder. It makes our coaches work harder. It makes our players work harder because it’s out there.
So that’s cool. These kids wouldn’t have even thought anything like that last year.
Then secondly, one of the most important things is that to be a really consistently good team, you’ve got to create depth. And a lot of our depth may be incoming freshmen. So I’m not there yet for next year. We’ll have our chances, but we were a seven-win team, which is average. And we lose a lot of good players on defense. We didn’t lose many. But the ones we lost were key players. And I think in three years we should be really good.
But next year, the question to me is who replaces (Jason) Strowbridge and (Aaron) Crawford and Myles Dorn. How many of those kids that are hurt can come back and play. How do we get better pass rushers. How do we force more turnovers on defense. How do we score more touchdowns instead of kick field goals. How does our kicking game help us win three games. So those are all three things in my mind that will lower the standards and the expectations until we prove those things.
Were there any players in particular that had potential to be that guy?
We’re going to keep our theme of ‘be the one.’ Obviously Chazz Surratt did amazing things without any experience. So our expectation of him is sky high. We think he knows what to do now. He’s a linebacker and he wasn’t last year. This time last year, he had a cast on his thumb and hadn’t played a snap, and we didn’t have any idea what he’d do on defense because he’d never been there. So expectations are high for him.
We’re really excited to look at Kyler McMichael (Clemson transfer) and Bryce Watts (Virginia Tech transfer) at corners with Patrice Rene, Myles Wolfolk, Cam Kelly, and those being hurt coming back. And then you’ve got Storm Duck, Trey (Morrison), DeAndre Hollins and D.J. Ford. So we now have a secondary that we can really coach and have competition.
The one thing coach (John) Wooden always said in basketball at UCLA is the bench is your friend. So if you’ve got competition, coaching becomes so much easier. Because they know they have to compete better than the other guy to play. And we didn’t have that at most positions last year.
We lose very few players next year (2021). That’s why I think our third year is where we can be really special.
Do you all expect to sign any players at signing day?
Right now we think we’re through. We’d look at a graduate transfer and they would come in at June. But as of today, and somebody always pops up, as of today we’re not planning on signing another guy from the 2020 class.
This story was originally published January 17, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
