Beneath Mack Brown’s incomparable charm and irresistible folksiness lies a cold-blooded, calculating politician with an ego the size of Texas.
That’s not a criticism, but rather a compliment. You have to be incredibly talented not just as a football coach, but as a human being, to pull off what Brown has pulled off over a 40-year career. And we’re not talking about winning a national championship in 2005.
At 73 years old, long past the point where his contemporaries have either quit or been pushed out of their last coaching jobs, Brown still thinks he’s the best person on Planet Earth to be the head football coach at North Carolina.
He’s wrong, of course. Incredibly wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, as Saturday’s 41-21 loss to Boston College showed.
And yet, Brown is apparently going to run the same play he did 11 years ago when it was obvious to everyone but him that it was over at Texas. Instead of bowing out gracefully and handing off to the next generation, Brown is going to force North Carolina to fire him.
Will they? Who knows. But a report this week from CBS Sports laid out how Brown has been telling people that he plans to return in 2025. And in an interview with Sirius XM, Brown framed his thoughts on retirement through the lens of helping the young people in his program.
‘When I see one with his head down or he’s got some joy because his sister won a contest or won a basketball game or he lost a girlfriend or flunked a test or dropped a ball on Saturday, that’s my purpose,” he said. “My purpose is to fix him and try to help him get to a better place.”
Brown continued: “There will be a day I wake up and say, ‘You know what? Somebody else should be doing this.’ And I haven’t gotten to that yet.”
UP AND DOWN: Winners and losers from Week 13 in college football
It’s a compelling story, but it’s also nonsense. If Brown really believes his purpose in life isn’t to win football games but to impart life lessons and inspire teenagers to do great things in life, there are multiple outlets for him that don’t require finishing ninth in the ACC or collecting a $5 million annual salary.
It’s harsh, but true. Given all he’s accomplished and how much money he’s made in coaching, Brown shouldn’t need to be nudged into retirement. If he could step outside himself for even a second and see the reality of where he is in his life, and where North Carolina’s program has been under his leadership since coming out of the TV booth in 2019, it would be a no-brainer.
But old men clinging to power, even when all the evidence suggests they should hand it off and spend the rest of their days enjoying the spoils of a life’s work, is a tale as old as time. Brown, sadly, is no exception.
North Carolina is 6-5 and hasn’t moved the needle much since he came back to the sidelines five years ago. The program is stagnant. His second stint with the Tar Heels wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success. There is enough data to suggest that North Carolina needs to thank Brown for his service and move on.
But there’s no easy way to do that when Brown is making it clear that he’s not going to play ball. Either North Carolina’s administration is going to have to do something really ugly now, or Brown is going to delay the inevitable by another year.
Which way will it go? Who knows. There’s still one week left in the season, and perhaps something can be done to bring Brown to his senses between now and next week when the Tar Heels finish the season against North Carolina State.
It’s time for change at North Carolina, but getting the head coach on board with a succession plan seems like a heavy lift at this point. That’s why the Tar Heels are No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which programs are feeling the most angst.
Four more in misery
Alabama: It’s a strange thing to wake up every Saturday morning and see Nick Saban on a television set laughing, hamming it up and making bad predictions just like any other run-of-the-mill college football pundit. The greatest coach off all time is a spectator these days. But the program he ran for 17 years doesn’t get the luxury of becoming a talking head. Alabama has to carry on with the business of high-stakes football games and living with the consequences of its mistakes.
The consequence Saturday, after a shocking 24-3 loss at Oklahoma, is that the Crimson Tide’s chances of making the College Football Playoff are on life support. At 8-3, with losses to the Sooners, Vanderbilt and Tennessee, this is already the worst Alabama season since 2007 when Saban inherited a mess from Mike Shula and went 7-6. The only thing for Crimson Tide fans to hold onto is a faint hope that wins over Georgia, South Carolina, LSU and Missouri can get them into the backdoor of the field if there’s chaos in the final couple weeks of the season.
But make no mistake, this debut from Kalen DeBoer has shown how big of a drop-off there is between Saban and everyone else. DeBoer is a really good coach — he proved it last year taking Washington to the national title game — but he’s just another guy in the SEC who could win or lose on any given day. And it’s not like Alabama is bereft of talent. Alabama’s roster is, at worst, third behind Georgia and Texas in the SEC. If DeBoer misses the playoff this year, you can go ahead and put him on the hot seat in 2025. Alabama fans won’t stand for missing a 12-team playoff very often, if ever. And they’re not wrong or unreasonable for having that expectation.
Rutgers: Icing the kicker is one of the dumbest concepts in sports, yet coaches fall for it all the time. Coaches like Greg Schiano. Leading Illinois 31-30 with 12 seconds left, Schiano called a timeout right before Illini kicker Ethan Moczulski went into his motion for a 58-yarder that missed badly. Given more time and evidence to re-evaluate his decision, Illinois coach Bret Bielema sent the offense onto the field and scored a game-winning touchdown on the next play.
Was it a fluke? Probably. But can you blame Schiano for a bad decision that led directly to disaster? Absolutely. These are the little things on the margins that change seasons, and Rutgers comes out on the wrong side of them too often. Since Schiano came back to Piscataway in 2020, he’s 12-32 in Big Ten play. It’s one thing if you’re losing to the league’s heavyweights but holding your own against everyone else. That would be a respectable existence for a program like Rutgers. But you can’t go 20 games under .500 in a league like the Big Ten unless you’re losing a whole lot of winnable games.
Nobody would say Rutgers is an easy job, but the whole point of bringing Schiano back was that he had a unique understanding of how to navigate the challenges there. From 2005-2011, he arguably overachieved as much as any coach in college football to consistently win eight or nine games a year under difficult circumstances. Now, he’s just treading water while losing way too often against programs of similar resources.
Virginia: After Clemson won national titles in 2016 and 2018, its coaching staff became an obvious place for desperate programs to poach from. But Dabo Swinney’s coaching tree has shriveled into a collection of branches that are hanging by a thread. Chad Morris, the offensive coordinator who recruited and helped develop Deshaun Watson, was 18-40 as a head coach at SMU and Arkansas. Jeff Scott went 4-26 at South Florida. Brent Venables, one of the great defensive coordinators in the history of the sport, is currently under fire at Oklahoma. And Tony Elliott, who turned down a lot of overtures before taking the Virginia job, has been a significant disappointment at 11-22.
At this point, there’s no use in analyzing why the former Clemson assistants have struggled collectively as head coaches. Every situation is different, and trying to find a through line between them would be speculative at best. But in Virginia’s case, you have to consider that Elliott’s predecessor Bronco Mendenhall went 8-5, 9-5, 5-5 and 6-6 over his last four seasons before stepping down. Unless Elliott can upset Virginia Tech next week, it’ll be three consecutive losing seasons without many signs of progress. What do Virginia fans hang their hat on these days? Certainly not the basketball program, which is reeling in the wake of Tony Bennett’s retirement. At least they’re still good at swimming and tennis.
That’s a major stain on Lane Kiffin’s résumé given the opportunity in front of him and the realistic expectations that were put on this Ole Miss team. Kiffin has delivered a lot of success to Oxford, including a 10-3 season in 2021 and an 11-2 record last year. But this new CFP format was supposed to be the the red carpet for Ole Miss’ big national breakthrough, and it just didn’t happen. If you’re an Ole Miss fan, you have to wonder if it ever will.
Miserable but not miserable enough
Pittsburgh: This is an all-systems failure. Pitt was 7-0 and very much in the mix for the ACC title. Now, the Panthers are 7-4 after a 37-9 loss at Louisville. When you look back on this season, none of Pitt’s seven wins to start the season were particularly groundbreaking. The Panthers simply took care of business against weak opponents, which perhaps inflated their record beyond reality. Still, you can’t just collapse like this.
Stanford: We have given a pass this year to the West Coast teams who entered the ACC under unusual circumstances, but you can’t ignore the manner in which Stanford lost to its most important local rival. After leading Cal 21-7 deep into the third quarter, Stanford completely lost the plot and the Big Game, 24-21, in Troy Taylor’s second season. It’s Cal’s fifth win over Stanford in the last six years, but it’s also a referendum on the state of Stanford football. A decade ago, this was a consistent top-10 program. Now, the 3-8 Cardinal will finish under .500 for the fifth time in the last six seasons while Taylor’s overall record stands at 6-17.
Oklahoma State: Unless the Cowboys upset Colorado next week, they will finish this season winless in the Big 12. That’s a remarkable sentence when you consider that Mike Gundy went 1-7 in 2005 but proceeded to finish .500 or better in the league 14 times since then. Over his long career, Oklahoma State has been through some ups and downs, but it’s never been this bad after a 56-48 loss to Texas Tech. Even though Oklahoma State sits at 3-8 during a season in which it was picked to finish third in the Big 12, Gundy is digging in. “There ain’t no way the old lady’s letting me retire,” he said. “I have as much energy now as I did when I took this job.” Time will tell whether that’s a good or bad thing.
Purdue: This awful season in West Lafayette is only matched by Jim Colletto going 1-10 in 1993 and Darrell Hazell going 1-11 in 2013. The common thread between those two coaches is neither lasted very long. We will see how long of a leash Purdue gives to Ryan Walters, the 38-year old who is now 5-18 over two seasons and winless in the Big Ten this year. But when Boilermaker fans watch in-state rival Indiana roll to a 10-1 record and likely playoff berth just one year after hiring Curt Cignetti, it adds even more urgency to the situation. If Purdue can pull the upset over the Hoosiers next week, all will be forgiven. But if not, Purdue has to think seriously about admitting a mistake and looking for a coach who can bring back respectability.
Arizona: If you’d have told a Wildcats fan in the preseason that their team would be 4-7 while Arizona State is contending for a CFP berth, they’d have laughed in your face. But that’s the reality as the season winds down. The Sun Devils are pressing toward a spot in the Big 12 championship game, while Arizona’s debut season under Brent Brennan has gone off the rails after a 49-28 loss to TCU. Arizona can play the spoiler next week, hosting Arizona State at home in the Territorial Cup. But that’s not the way this was supposed to go with Arizona starting the season in the Top 25 and the Sun Devils way off the radar after the Herm Edwards era.
(This story was updated to change a video).