UNC football head coach Mack Brown joined 97.9 The Hill this morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire.
Brown and the Tar Heels are now 7-1 on the season after defeating Pitt at Kenan Stadium Saturday night. The team can even clinch the Coastal Division as soon as next weekend, though it would require three other teams to lose. Carolina is also now inside the Top 20 in the AP Poll at No. 17 this week. Fans are still eagerly awaiting the release of the first College Football Playoff poll, which makes its season debut on Tuesday. But Brown is preaching caution to his team.
Here are a few of Brown’s answers on various topics:
On the Pitt win: Winning solves everything. It makes you feel better and happier. I’m just so excited about our community and sitting here with seven wins in late October, early November. That’s fun, to be playing for something this late. I loved our crowd on Saturday night. I just think with pride about that many people coming in to Chapel Hill for our business owners and our community, and how much money it brings into our town. People struggled so much with COVID and not having crowds, and it’s fun to see the crowds back. Our crowd made a huge difference. You guys were loud and you were excited and it pumped pumped the kids up and helped lead to that 28 unanswered points after about 10:37 left in the third quarter. I just loved the way that our guys finished the game.
On the fourth-quarter comeback: We spend parts of every day talking about the fourth quarter and finishing games. It’s part of who you have to be to win. Good teams finish games, and bad teams get beat late. That’s just what happens. Our guys are very, very proud of that. Our students and our fans really helped them celebrate heading into the fourth quarter. I’m just really, really proud of the way the guys played.
On preparing for this weekend’s game at Virginia: We’ve tried to start over every week. This has been one of the best player-led teams that I’ve been around. Coaches can only handle you until you get on the field. We don’t get to go on the field with them. Coaches don’t play. The team is run by the players on the team and the leaders on the team, and these guys have done a great job. And they’ll have a lot of people bragging on them this week. Virginia had a heartbreaker against Miami at home in a four-overtime game. So what we’ve got to do is go back and not talk about polls because they’ve accomplished some things right now that nobody talked about in the preseason, not talk about the Coastal race because that’s very unimportant to us right now, or the conference championship game because you don’t get there unless you’re good enough. All they’re gonna talk about is going on the road where it’s very difficult to win and playing a very talented Virginia team. That’s all this is about. So we’ve got to get back down to earth and get back to work. Sunday is to pat yourself on the back or heal your wounds from the previous game, and Monday you go back to work. You’ve got a one-game season, and that’s in Charlottesville.
On his message to the fans: I just want to thank the community. This is a fun team, and you guys have embraced them. I appreciate so much that everybody is being so positive about this team. And this team just keeps getting better. We’ve got four tough weeks left. We’ve got a target on our back now because we’re leading the Coastal. That’s something we didn’t have at the first of the year, so we’ve changed the narrative. And it’ll be harder because everybody will give us their best shot. And that’ll be a fun challenge for this team going into the end. So thank you, fans. Keep doing what you’re doing. Everybody get to Charlottesville that can this weekend. If you’re sitting around wondering what to do this weekend, it’s a noon game. Let’s get to Charlottesville and have a lot of Carolina blue in that stadium.
Listen below for the full conversation with Mack Brown, and tune in to hear the segment live on Monday mornings each game week!
Featured image via Inside Carolina/Jim Hawkins
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