Mack Brown had his pre-bowl press conference and let it all hang out.
The Carolina football coach is excited about his new coaching hires, upset about what the transfer portal and NIL are doing to the game and is glad his team has a chance to beat 15th-ranked Oregon, which is a two-touchdown favorite in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego on December 28 at 5 pm EST.
Brown introduced new offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey and new offensive line coach Randy Clements, who he says are going to tweak the Air Raid offense of Phil Longo, who left for the same position at Wisconsin and took one-year O-line coach Jack Bicknell with him. “I don’t need guys who want to install their own system,” Brown said. “I need guys who want to fix things.”
Lindsey comes from one season at Central Florida after three years as head coach at Troy and, according to Brown, is well-versed in the Air Raid offense. “I started as an ‘Air Raid’ guy way back in high school,” Lindsey, 48, said, “and over the years learned a lot from different coaches.”
Clements, 56, who comes from North Texas after three years under Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss, met Brown in his office wearing a cap and T-shirt that says, “Run the damn ball!” And that is why Brown hired him because the Tar Heels had an average running attack this season in 13 games and put too much pressure on Drake Maye’s passing fancy. Brown says Clements is “very physical, old school, they knock people down and run north to south, none of this sideway stuff. I was trying to look at how do we fix red zone offense.”
Clements’ only connection to UNC was coaching at Baylor in the 2015 Russell Athletic Bowl, where the Bears ran a wildcat offense that shredded Gene Chizik’s Carolina defense for 653 yards rushing in the 49-38 win.
Now that he’s moved assistants around for the bowl game, where Lindsey and Clements will be observing but not coaching, Brown is working on the outgoing and incoming transfers and trying to stay out of any discussion about NIL, other than saying, “Drake got offered a lot of money to go to different schools, and it’s tampering, a hundred percent tampering.”
He won’t name the schools that offered Maye, only that Maye is coming back for his third year in the program because “he believes in this university, it’s his school and that’s why he stayed and didn’t take the money and leave.”
Brown said he doesn’t know if UNC’s collective Heels4Life offered Maye anything to stay because university employees cannot be involved in NIL. “All I promised was to get him a great teacher who would help him with footwork and throwing motion. And Chip is a great teacher of quarterbacks.”
Featured image via Inside Carolina
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NIL combined with the transfer portal will end up being the worst thing to ever happen to college sports for those that prefer it be a student athlete program.
We already have a model for this, and it’s minor leagues/clubs. In the United States, MLB teams have minor-league farm teams that pay their players. Elsewhere in the world, smaller soccer/football clubs provide access for prospects to show up and show off for the big time, and they ALSO PAY THEIR PLAYERS. Both of these are career paths not tied to college. They’re jobs, requiring skill and dedication.
The American system of tying this track to high education is, putting it delicately, bad. Promising education to those who didn’t luck out into a life and family who can afford college only if you’re willing to sacrifice your body is a grim prospect, and even then only available to a select few who will make it. So many more children will hurt themselves, literally, in pursuit of a goal that is statistically unlikely to pan out.
With that in mind, also carry with you that this path is mostly taken by non-white people, and the education received by the students who take on athletic scholarships is demonstrably practically worthless. The UNC academic scandal, and all the others like it, highlighted that UNC isn’t the only college with fake courses, they’re just a school that got caught.
How could it be anything else? They spend 40+ hours a week in the gym and practice in order to keep up with the physical requirements of being a top-tier athlete. Plus, the games themselves! Often requiring travel, weekends and weeknights completely spoken for, how could any “student-athlete” possibly have time to effectively do a full course load on top of working 50-60 hour weeks? Get a full night’s sleep? The answer is easy, they can’t. This is a more than full time job. Tying professional sports so closely to college isn’t just dumb and bad, it’s irresponsible and often ruining lives by wasted prime educational time and high potential for injury. All it does is serve to stoke fires powering money machines, and that’s also why it’s not going to stop any time soon.
“The American system…”
To put it mildly the “system” is what developed, no coercion or government manipulation caused it.
There is the G league now for BB, and any kid that wishes to take that path is free to do so.
Football is a different game. But there are other pro venues for anyone that wishes to pursue it.
The problem is quite simple, you have to have paying customers in order to have any league that pays the players. You’re free to develop them.
I reject the idea that “who can afford college only if you’re willing to sacrifice your body” as being completely wrong. Almost anyone can borrow or work their way through school. They can do a couple years at very low cost, then move further up if they desire. There are many community college’s that are affordable.
“With that in mind, also carry with you that this path is mostly taken by non-white people, and the education received by the students who take on athletic scholarships is demonstrably practically worthless. ”
Have you ever been to a swim meet, a field hockey game, a La Cross game, a baseball game, etc? Lot’s of white players are athletes, I’d guess most are. And you are completely wrong about the education received being worthless. Perhaps you cherry pick a few while ignoring the vast majority of athletes that are there for the education.
What does skin color have to do with it?
Simply put, you can keep NIL but you’ll have to eliminate the transfer portal, or you are going to get cheating on a massive scale.
And, I suspect the writer has an alternative to help support athletes besides “free college”.
How many athletes do you know that were forced to attend a university? Zero
I have always supported the university paying a reasonable amount to athletes in order that they might be able to live a reasonable life while in school. I recognize that there are some very poor students that would benefit from some support. This would have been an easy path for the NCAA to take.