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You want the good news first, then the bad news?
There is a hush around Chapel Hill and the state about Carolina football 2023, not the hype we’ve grown used to. No one is saying much except the head coach, who says enough for everyone. The theme is “Good To Great.”
“Nine is good,” Mack Brown says of the total victories last season that included an ACC Coastal championship in the final season of divisional play. “But nine is not enough. We’ve got to do better.”
We saw and heard that theme all over the ACC Network special on the Tar Heels that aired Thursday. It made alumni and fans proud of their school and football program. Several players were shown visiting New Zealand over the summer and Washington, D.C., for an ACC “Unite” rally for social justice.
It showed pristine Chapel Hill and scenic Kenan Stadium and football facilities that are second to none, except at places like Clemson and Alabama, which have more money to spend and spend it. The Tar Heel players are great-looking and well-spoken, intent on doing something special this fall.
“Good To Great . . . Nine is not enough.” That’s also the bad news.
We want to believe it while knowing that truly great in football has never happened here. We’ve had teams, especially in Brown’s first tenure, that came close, had back-to-back 10-win seasons before he left for Texas, where his Longhorns were great for his first 12 years there.
But Brown is UNC’s sixth head coach since he left in 1997. Only one of those prior five coaches had 10 wins in one of those 21 seasons, Larry Fedora in 2015. Brown is 99-68-1 in his 14 years in Chapel Hill, but only 61-49-1 in the ACC. That is good, but certainly not great.
He hired a coaching staff in 2019 that was supposed to excel in recruiting, because Carolina needed more good players. Since then, Brown has regularly changed offensive and defensive assistants, saying nice things about all the new ones until they were either fired or left for other jobs.
Every summer, it seems, Carolina is working harder and is more together than the year before. But fans have been conditioned to not expect too much.
Brown didn’t like all the attention basketball got in his early 40s, but in his early 70s he is ultra-supportive of all the other sports at UNC. Some of them have been truly great. We all want that for Carolina football, and hope it happens with this, perhaps his deepest and most talented Tar Heel team.
But they have to show us before we dare take the bait again.
Featured image vis 247 Sports
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