Chansky's Notebook: Turnover, Tampering

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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Chansky’s Notebook: Turnover, Tampering

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