Heel Tough Blog: Mack Brown Weighs In On Current State of Tar Heel Football

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For the first time since his firing, we got the chance to hear from former coach Mack Brown on his firing and the current state of the Tar Heels and it went as expected.

When it comes to his firing, Brown seems to have come to terms with what went down but still feels he didn’t get the support that he needed in the time that he was on campus. “It was time for me,” Brown told Dusty Dvoracek and Danny Kanell on SiriusXM College Sports Radio. “North Carolina didn’t have NIL money and I said we were kind of a slow bleed. We weren’t able to recruit the top kids like we were when we first got there. So it was time for them and it was time for me. It’s kind of like a divorce. Everybody was ready, it’s just who and how and how you split at the end. So it was best for me to get out. We always built programs on fit, and our last couple years there, we were having to get parents with money. We were trying to get kids over a 3.0. That’s who we could get.”

Brown would go on, praising a recent Tar Heel team and one player in particular for sticking it out despite the money not being there and other lucrative offers coming their way. “We signed 26 players at North Carolina our next-to-last year – high school players – and didn’t pay them a penny. We even had Omarion Hampton, he got offered $1 million-plus to leave and he stayed for $300,000. I told him he should leave, because it was just crazy as you were looking at those things.”

Brown then steered the conversation towards Bill Belichick and the current expectations in Chapel Hill with a completely remade roster and more financial support. “As far as North Carolina and Bill Belichick now, he’s arguably the best coach ever. They’ve committed money to it, they’ve helped him with academics. They’ve lowered those standards some. So there’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be successful. And anymore, they’ve changed the roster so you’ve got a chance to succeed at the highest level, and I expect him to do that and I’m proud for him.”

On the surface, this screams sour grapes from Brown and feels like a shot at the football program, especially with the part about lowering standings. However, to be fair to him, these are fair questions for him to ask when he didn’t have the same playing field in his time here while facing the same era of college sports. The question is, how much would it have really mattered? Despite not having the money, the Tar Heels still had the talent in the program to be more consistent than they were and should not have lost the games that they did as significant favorites, something that was the ultimate undoing of Brown’s regime. It would have been nice for the Tar Heels’ athletic department to commit to the program a little more under him, especially in his final few seasons to help correct the issues that the team had in the offensive trenches and the defensive side of the ball, but Brown also needs to take some accountability for why things got where they did. It also makes sense that he is irritated about how it ended with Bubba Cunningham firing him virtually from Hawai’i, but according to the reports, this is what had to happen because he was telling players and media members that he was coming. In the moment, it’s understandable that fans are frustrated with what Brown said while still realizing that he is the greatest coach in program history to this point. The hope is that this was the venting that he needed and that the athletic department can repair the relationship enough so that he can be properly honored in the near future.