UNC football head coach Mack Brown joined Aaron Keck this morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire.
Brown’s Tar Heels are now 8-1 on the year, 5-0 in ACC play and a win away from a Coastal Division title. Carolina is also 5-0 on the road this season, a complete flip from the team’s 0-6 record away from Kenan Stadium last year. The Tar Heels will look to make it a perfect 6-0 in true road games this weekend at Wake Forest. UNC hasn’t won in Winston-Salem since 2004.
Here are a few of Brown’s answers on various topics:
On the win at Virginia: I’m really, really happy. Virginia’s been a hard team for Carolina to play for years. It’s a rival game, the longest rival game for us. One of the older rivalries in the South. The two schools are very, very similar, and the fanbases are similar. They know each other, they work together. They work against each other. It’s an important game for us. There was a stretch there where we were 4-16 out of the last 20 trips to Charlottesville. We knew this was gonna be a tough game. Road games are tough. I didn’t think we played really well the first half, but we came out and played a very good second half and found a way to win the game.
On what’s allowing the Tar Heels to win close games: I think it’s confidence. You have confidence in who you are. We’d won two games the year before we got here and three games the year before, so that was five games in two years. We had to try to learn to win again. And winning’s not easy. Then we won seven games, one of those a bowl game, the first year. The second year we go to the Orange Bowl, and we lost a last-possession game at Florida State. We lost a last-possession at Virginia. We lost a last-possession game, really, here to Notre Dame. And then, there’s about five minutes left in the game when we lost in the Orange Bowl to Texas A&M. But it comes in stages. First you’ve got to learn to win. Then you’ve got to learn to win close games. Then you’ve got to learn to put your foot on the gas and put teams away. We did that with Pittsburgh last week, but we haven’t done that with anybody else. That’s the next step here. We’ve got to keep winning and learn how to put people away.
On this weekend’s game at Wake Forest: The games the last two years have been in the 50s. They’ve been tremendous games. Wake’s got a great program. They’ve got a lot of older guys on their team that know how to win. They’ve had two tough games the last two weeks on the road. They’ll be back at home; they’ll be excited. And as usual, we’ll get their best shot. They’ve got one of the best quarterbacks in the country. They’ve got as good a receiving corps as there is anywhere in the country. And they play hard. They’re well-coached. They always have very few penalties. So we’ll have to play our best game to have a chance to win.
On his message to the fans: When I was here before, we would fill other people’s stands. It was so cool that everywhere we played, it was like a home game for us. And a lot of the fans went to Virginia last weekend. The band was there, a bunch of students came. There was a bus of students that came up. We had fans everywhere. And there’s still some seats available at Winston-Salem, so let’s buy them up. Let’s get up there; we did the same thing at App State. It was really, really important for us. And this going to be such a tight game again. We need a difference, and you fans can be the difference.
Listen below for the full conversation between Mack Brown and Aaron Keck, 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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