At one point in time during this season, it appeared North Carolina football coach Mack Brown’s retirement was imminent. But amid a three-game win streak, the Tar Heels coach may not be ready to move on just yet.
After a 70-50 loss to James Madison in September, North Carolina’s first of the season, Brown said he essentially offered to resign if his players felt he was no longer the right coach to lead them. As the saying goes, cooler heads prevailed and Brown, 73, remained the head coach of the Tar Heels, but things did not improve.
In fact, the bad was only beginning; after falling to James Madison, UNC lost its first three games of ACC play, including to rival Duke. The four consecutive losses put the Tar Heels at 3-4 and Brown on a seemingly inevitable path of either resigning or being fired.
However, since that four-game skid, things have stabilized in Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels have won three consecutive games, including this past weekend’s in-state rivalry game vs. Wake Forest.
With a nine-win season still very much a possibility — the Tar Heels have won nine or more games just twice in the last 25 years — Brown, who many expect to retire soon, says he is not quite ready to do that.
“What I did at Texas is I started planning on trying to retire. And it didn’t work,” Brown said on College Sports on SiriusXM. “I just wasn’t as good at what I was doing. I was trying to make sure everybody’s OK. So I decided this time that I wouldn’t do that. I’m going to work as hard as I can every day of my life to do what I’m supposed to do, and right now, my role is to help these young people … There’ll be a day I wake up and say, ‘You know what? Somebody else needs to be doing this…’ I haven’t gotten to that yet.”
“There’s going to be a day I wake up and say, somebody else needs to do be doing this, and I haven’t gotten to that yet.”@UNCFootball HC Mack Brown weighs in on the idea of retirement on #CSToday.@CoachMackBrown | @KrisBudden | @NicoleAuerbach | @RoddyJones20 pic.twitter.com/8VXrjdFeOp
— College Sports on SiriusXM (@SXMCollege) November 20, 2024
Mack Brown is in 16th total season as North Carolina football coach
Brown initially coached the Tar Heels starting back in 1988 when he succeeded Dick Crum as head coach. In his first two seasons, Brown won just two of 22 games. However, he quickly turned the program around and led UNC to eight consecutive winning seasons, a feat that had not been achieved at North Carolina since the Tar Heels recorded nine winning seasons in a row from 1897 to 1905.
After leading the team to a 69-46-1 and record over 10 seasons, Brown left North Carolina to become the Texas head coach. In Austin, Brown won more than 75% of his games and, most importantly, the national championship during the 2005 season.
Following a five-year retirement, Brown returned to coaching and Chapel Hill when he became the head football coach again in November 2018. In the six seasons he has been back, he has struggled to achieve the same success he did before he left for Austin.
While the Tar Heels reached the Orange Bowl in 2020, they have not reached 10 wins since Brown returned; in contrast, UNC won 10 or more games three times during Mack’s first stint. The most North Carolina can win this season is nine, as two games remain on UNC’s regular-season schedule — North Carolina visits Boston College this weekend before closing the regular season at home vs. rival NC State — and the Tar Heels are eligible for a bowl game.
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