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Mack Brown says the key to winning football games is not getting comfortable.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable coach in the country today is Nick Saban, who is three months younger than the 72-year-old Brown. The Crimson Tide are a very uncomfortable 2-1 after losing to Texas at home and a subpar performance in a 17-3 win over South Florida.
The biggest reason the state of Alabama is far from comfortable is Saban does not have a quarterback who can take the Tide where they usually go – into the College Football Playoffs. Some people forget that QB was supposed to be Drake Maye, an All-American at UNC and in the early Heisman Trophy talk.
Just as Brown did when he took over a floundering program and got Sam Howell to flip from Florida State back to his native state, Maye had even a better reason to change his commitment from ‘Bama to Carolina.
After all, Maye was raised a Tar Heel since his father, Mark, starred at QB for his home state university in the 1980s, more than a decade before his fourth son was born into a family that already had great athletes from dad to mom, Aimee, to older brothers Cole, Luke and Beau.
So Brown got his second big flip, which makes you wonder what shape the UNC program would be in without Howell and Maye and, certainly, how much more comfortable Saban would be today if No. 10 played for him instead.
“The coaches I’ve known that kept teams from getting comfortable had the best players,” Brown said this week. “And they were so deep you’d put them on the bench if they ever weren’t ready to play.”
Carolina has stacked good recruiting classes together since Brown returned, and it looks like Maye has his deepest offensive line, enough solid running backs and a plethora of receivers even though potentially the best is still ineligible.
Barring the unexpected, Maye will be a high NFL draft choice after this season, and Brown will likely hit the transfer portal to find competition behind Conner Harrell, a redshirt freshman who is from, you guessed it, Alabama. Brown’s fifth Tar Heel team of his second tour is undefeated but hasn’t played well enough to get the coach close to comfortable, actually far from it.
“We won nine, we hadn’t won nine games in a long time,” he said of last year. “Then we got comfortable, and you can’t get comfortable in life.”
On going to Pitt Saturday night, he told his team to the contrary, “We’re 3-0 and I’m mad because I want you to be 4-0, and you can’t get comfortable.”
Featured image via Associated Press/Reinhold Matay
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