Mack Brown, the 73-year-old football coach at North Carolina, who is 44-32 in his second stint at the school, including 6-5 this season, said Monday that intends to return to the sidelines for the 2025 season.
“You never talk to your athletic director until the year’s over. Everybody always does that. My total focus is on NC State. What an awful thing to be talking about me when we just played a bad game and need to beat State,” said Brown on Monday, referencing the “bad game,” a 41-21 loss to Boston College on Saturday, that snapped a modest three-game winning streak.
All this means for UNC Football is, at least another year of delay before the athletics department can move on to the next guy and begin, yet again, the effort to be relevant on the national scene.
Brown had the program there at the end of his first run in Chapel Hill, leading the Heels to an 11-1 finish in 1997 that concluded with a 42-3 thumping of Virginia Tech in the Gator Bowl.
Carl Torbush coached the bowl game, and was hired thereafter to be the full-time replacement, but he only last three seasons (going 17-18 overall) before getting the axe in favor of John Bunting, who had four losing seasons in his six years (with a 27-45 record) before he was also sacked.
Butch Davis (24-15 in three seasons) got caught up in the academic scandal, and was replaced by Larry Fedora, who guided Carolina to an 11-3 finish in 2015, before getting himself fired after going 3-9 in 2017 and 2-9 in 2018 (and finishing with a 45-43 record).
That got us to Brown, who led UNC to an 8-4 record in 2020, and a 9-5 record in 2022, but has underperformed to the expectations, particularly relative to recruiting, with three straight Top 15 recruiting classes, from 2020-2022 not panning out on the field.
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Chris Graham
