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Mack Brown let it all hang out with the national media.
It is easier for big media like Sports Illustrated and Yahoo to get access at UNC to do a piece that will enhance the Tar Heels’ national profile. That happened last week when SI.com’s Ross Dellenger had a private meeting with Mack Brown in his office at the Kenan Football Center.
Now, UNC holds more football and basketball press conferences than any school in the ACC. Steve Kirschner and Jeremy Sharpe set their pressers before the season and release a schedule to the media. That’s when as many as 50 reporters gather at the same site and hear the questions and answers for Brown and Hubert Davis and their players.
So few “scoops” come from that kind of egalitarian system, which is why the local media and plethora of websites and blogs often have the same material after the pressers and videos are released to the public.
For Dellenger and SI.com, it was an exclusive until they publish and other outlets quote the material and credit it back to the original source. Brown cut loose about subjects that he covers in his sometimes twice-weekly press conferences. The SI.com long-form story quoted Brown as saying of college football, “We’re the NFL. . . we’re the mini-NFL. That’s where we are headed. We will never see amateurism again. It’s gone. I hate it. I thought that’s who we are, what college football is.”
He added, “We are the farm league for the NFL with many NFL programs . . .headed toward an NFL model.” The soon-to-be 72-year old coach told Dellenger he can be outspoken about NIL and the transfer portal because he is “at a different point in my life than most coaches.”
“Cheaters cheat,” he said in a phrase he has used often with the local media. “People who used to give inducements are still doing that. It’s just called NIL. This stupid thing about it’s not pay-for-play. I wish we would stop hiding behind NIL.”
Brown knows what should happen even if it sounds similar to what he is griping about now. “Different regulations would apply to each of these (3) new divisions: Power 5, Group of 5 (mid-majors) and the FCS (Football College Subdivision, or the old Division I-AA),” he said.
The Power 5 conferences would still pay athletes and coaches whatever they wanted and keep building facilities in the continuing arms race. Isn’t that where we are now, just for the NFL-like schools?
Featured image via Associated Press/Chris Seward
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