Last November, I asked Bubba Cunningham if Mack Brown might retire after the 2023 football season. He said, “It’s up to him.”
“I thought you were the athletic director,” I responded, half-jokingly.
“It’s up to him,” Bubba repeated, as he smiled and walked away.
Then Carolina lost its last three games for the second straight season, finishing 8-5 and short of the 10-win record that the oldest active college coach with the most Ws covets for his program.
After your 73-year-old coaching veteran — who makes $5 million a year — puts a team on the field like the 70-50 losers to James Madison Saturday, it’s natural that Brown’s future became the hottest topic from the stadium to social media to various bloggers and websites reporting that he told his players in the locker room he would step down if they thought he was to blame. The team, reportedly, rebuffed him after allowing the most points ever in Kenan, including a 42-7 stretch by JMU in the first half that ended 53-21.
Meanwhile, the Dukes of the Sunbelt Conference were taking a team picture celebrating likely the biggest win in school history, bringing back memories of other Dukes (from Durham) rollicking in front of the 41-0 scoreboard in 1989 – almost 35 years ago when Brown’s second UNC team went 1-10 just as his first team had done. Brown was such a positive promotion machine in those days, you wanted to believe, as he liked to say, “It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when.”
That very declaration can now apply to retirement after his 16th Tar Heel team over two tenures looked abysmal in the last 18-plus minutes of the first half after coming in as a 10-plus point favorite to win its fourth game. Now 3-1, Carolina has to find a way to rebound against the undefeated Durham-based Duke (4-0) this Saturday at Wallace Wade Stadium.
“It was awful defensively,” Brown said of setting a UNC record for points allowed in a half. With JMU running the clock after it had emptied its bag of tricks in the first half, the final 70 points tied the most given up by the Tar Heels since the infamous 2014 loss at East Carolina in Larry Fedora’s third season at the helm.
“And then we have a punt blocked (for a touchdown), an onside klick that hits us in the chest and we drop it,” added Brown. “Both of those lead to points and then we throw an interception for a touchdown. You can’t draw it up any worse than we did.”
Besides being badly out-coached, Brown’s team looked like it lost to better athletes and tougher players. “I’ve been here six years, and you shouldn’t lose a game like this,” he concluded.
James Madison running back Jobi Malary (28) celebrates with fans after an NCAA college football game against North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., Saturday, Sept. 21, 2024. (Photo via Daniel Lin/Daily News-Record and Associated Press.)
Not to this degree — but it is the eighth time in those five-plus seasons that his Tar Heels lost as a double-digit favorite and the fourth time they lost by 10 or more points to a double-digit underdog.
The Heels weren’t that bad on offense and might have found a quarterback. Though Jacolby Criswell was the anxious culprit in throwing the pick six, he passed for 474 yards (obviously a career high) in his second start at UNC and threw three touchdown passes.
The first went for 35 yards to tight end John Copenhaver to get Carolina on the scoreboard and a 34-yarder to Bryson Nesbit to make the deficit closer (21-25) than it was from then on. Omarion Hampton was bottled up early but finished with three touchdowns, the first for 28 yards to give the Heels their only lead of the game and the other two padding the Big O’s stats of 139 net yards, a 7.3 yard average in 19 carries. That was in the microcosm of the game.
The Mack-rocosm was the game plan that first-year FBS coach Bob Chesney and his staff cooked up after perhaps purposely setting the stage with two low-octane victories over Charlotte (30-7) and Gardner Webb (13-6). With Carolina on the schedule after an off week, what if the Dukes purposely showed little or nothing to their first two lightweight foes while scouting video on Carolina’s three victories and making the Heels preparation look lame by comparison?
For example, the first play of the game saw JMU’s North Carolina-born quarterback Alonza Barnett III pull the ball out and turn an option left into 39-yard run as the UNC corner defenders bit for the fake. Maybe an over-aggressive Tar Heel tendency that the Dukes exploited?
Many of 22 completions by the 6-foot Burnett — who played for Greensboro’s Grimsley and apparently wasn’t recruited by Brown — went to receivers in space from their crisp rout-running and opponent’s pathetic pass coverage. Even a blocked punt for a touchdown (Carolina also had one of those in the second half) and a trick two-point conversion that caught the Heels napping may have come from UNC flaws scouted by JMU coaches.
The out-schemed Geoff Collins, Brown’s new defensive coordinator, will find himself on the hot seat like his two predecessors if his side of the ball doesn’t quickly return to matching three good performances this season, when the Tar Heels held opponents to 232 yards per game compared to the 611 they permitted Saturday. It drove much of the sold-out crowd and majority of students dressing in Carolina blue to the exits by halftime.
Rameses was not the only one left in disbelief over the Carolina football team’s performance on Saturday. (Photo via Andy Mead and UNC Athletics Communications.)
Bad tackling, a bad secondary and bad special teams play have been hallmarks of Brown editions that were often bailed out by quarterbacks now on NFL rosters. One of them, Drake Maye, watched from the sideline after his New England Patriots’ equally terrible 24-3 loss to the Jets Thursday night.
Brown probably got home in time to watch Texas, his former team, blow out Louisiana-Monroe behind ballyhooed back-up quarterback Arch Manning before 102,000 fans in Austin. Having won a national championship there and played for another, Brown’s 16 years still ended with fan unrest and his resignation.
When his Tar Heels open ACC play, Brown will bring his 13-game winning streak over Duke across the county line against a team looking better every week under new coach and old Mack mate Manny Diaz.
However the Hall of Famer does it — if he does it — another win over the Blue Devils could put Mack back on the right side of the bubble he has occupied for most of his return to Chapel Hill.
Featured photo via Daniel Lin/Daily News-Record and via the Associated Press.
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
It’s time for “the powers of UNC “to make a commitment to top 20 every year and do what is necessary to achieve that goal RIGHT NOW. The players with NIL want more so the fans and donors deserve this.
Mack 2.0 hasn’t earned the right the decide if he remains as coach. It probably means he’ll get to decide anyway. Neither has he earned the right to help choose a successor which means he might still be involved. At any rate the next coach and assistant coaches should not be allowed to have any UNC football connections. It’s past time for UNC to be finally be honest with donors and fans. Do they really want to be relevant in football? Or will UNC continue a history of talking big but continue to tolerate being an also-ran. UNC appears to be ahead of schedule in 2024. Instead of fading in mid-October they’re getting off to an earlier start than usual.
Mack was, is, and always will be a terrible game coach. (And by “always,” I mean that Bubba DOES NOT HAVE THE GUTS to fire him, so he’ll be around eating pudding and losing games until he’s 90). That would mean that our “lets give out participation trophies” university might not actually be the NICE PLACE everyone has come to love, especially football underdogs!
Please, if anyone reading this has ANY pull with Bubba and the “deep state”at UNC, please go back and look at who Mack has beaten since his “Mack Is Back” time.
Maybe Bubba needs to be fired!
No, I’ll tell you 3 people that need to be fired: (1) The guy who kept saying, “First Down, Tar…” while we were losing by 36; (2) The band director that made the band have to stay the entire game and suffer like the crazy people that buy season tickets; and (3) Taylor Vippolis because he actually tells the truth about disasters like Saturday and the real reason for them; and we all know that the truth about “Hall Of Fame” Mack is not welcome in Chapel Hill.
Since Mack ain’t going nowhere, let’s see what Campbell, Mercer, Wofford, and Bethune-Colman are doing next year. Maybe we can join them and form a new conference, and maybe Mack can win his third conference title in 40 years of head coaching!
Art, as usual you nailed it. Under Mack 2.0, UNC has played DOWN to the opponent’s level in every game, resulting in losses that shouldn’t happen. We need a culture change at Carolina: 1) hire a young aggressive and hungry coach who wants to use the UNC brand to build a reputation; 2) start booking opponents who, in the early going, will kick our ass but make us learn how to play at another level (calling Georgia, Tennessee, Bama); 3) make football fun again by inviting a tailgate culture onto our campus, taking advantage of our student enthusiasm and beautiful Chapel Hill setting; 4) take off the gloves and get ultra-high-net-worth donors to put up Bama-Texas level NIL cash to attract best talent; 5) tell the NCAA to stop persecuting us over academic BS that every other Power 5 program runs on a daily basis (example: is the NCAA taking a closer look at all the Medieval French Renaissance Literature majors starting on the offensive line at Georgia?). The Carolina Way has a proud and wonderful tradition, but even dueling gentlemen take off the gloves to defeat their opponent. Go Tarheels!!!!