Heel Tough Blog: Tar Heels Set to Honor Coach Mack Brown on Monday

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For the first time since his firing late in the 2024 regular season, the Tar Heels will be honoring former football head coach Mack Brown.

On Thursday, the Tar Heels' athletic department revealed that they will be welcoming Brown and his wife, Sally, back for the basketball team’s game with the Louisville Cardinals on Monday.

Brown, who is the all-time leader in victories by a football coach at UNC, was fired back in the fall of 2024 following an up-and-down second stint with the program which began back in 2019.

After posting a 69-46-1 record in his first season, Brown would go 44-33 in his second stint with the program, getting them to the first January bowl game since his stint in 2020 and bringing the program its first division title since 2015. He would finish his Tar Heel coaching career with a 113-79-1 record with ten bowl appearances, which included four January bowl games that he was responsible for.

Outside of his time with UNC, Brown spent head coaching tenures with Appalachian State, Tulane and Texas, with the stint in Austin being his most successful. In 16 seasons with the Longhorns program, he posted a 158-48 record, led them to a bowl game in all but one of those 16 seasons and had the program in four BCS bowl games. In 2005, Brown would reach the pinnacle and win the program’s fourth national title and their first since 1970 by defeating the USC Trojans 41-38 in the Rose Bowl behind the arm of quarterback Vince Young. Brown would once again reach the BCS national title game in 2010, but would fall short thanks to Nick Saban and Alabama, who won 37-21 after Longhorns quarterback Colt McCoy went down with an injury early in the first quarter.

In 2018, Brown was elected first ballot to the College Football Hall of Fame with 244 wins, which at the time had him ranked 10th on the all-time D1 coaching list. Following his second stint in Chapel Hill, he finished his coaching career with a 288-155-1 record which places him 7th in D1 history in wins and became the first head coach at the D1 level to win 100+ wins at two different schools.

While this may be seen as a controversial decision to honor Brown less than two years after his firing, it is the right thing to do. Guys like Carl Snavely, Bill Dooley and Dick Crum had success in their time on the Tar Heel sidelines, but no one has done more for the program than Mack Brown has. I’m glad that the athletic department is doing this and can’t wait for the day when they honor him in Kenan Stadium the way he deserves to be recognized.