UNC football head coach Mack Brown joined Aaron Keck Monday morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire.
Carolina suffered its worst loss of Mack Brown’s second tenure in Chapel Hill, a 45-22 beatdown at the hands of Georgia Tech. The Tar Heels are now out of the national top 25 polls for the first time this season, and now face the reality that their conference championship ambitions are likely done for. But Brown still believes the future is bright for the program.
Here are a few of his answers on various topics:
On evaluating the loss to Georgia Tech: The biggest thing is, you can’t have three turnovers in Georgia Tech territory, and go for fourth down in Georgia Tech territory on a 4th-and-1 and not make it. It puts entirely too much stress on your defense. The defense played well except for a few plays that were explosive plays that really hurt us. But I see a lot of progress in that area. We’ve still gotta get to the quarterback better, we’ve still gotta force more turnovers. But they had high energy, and Georgia Tech’s got some really good skill players at quarterback and at wide receiver and at running back. They’re as good as anybody. But I was proud of most of the things our defense did. We just missed too many tackles.
On his team’s goals for the rest of the season: Our goal is to beat Duke. Media goals get ahead of us. We want to win every game, starting with the opener. You want to win the Coastal [Division]. You want to win the conference championship, you want to get to the playoffs, and you want to win all the games. But what we’ve got to do is get better as a team, and we didn’t do that last week on offense. We’re better on special teams than we’ve been. We blocked another punt, which is really good. We’re getting better on defense, we’re gonna get there. Offensively, we’ve got to be more consistent. We’re 10-4 at home because of our great fanbase, and we’re 5-7 away. So, great teams win on the road. And we’re just a good team right now that’s continuing to get better. We’ve got more great recruits coming in, so the future is very, very bright. But the only thing important this week is to beat Duke.
On what he sees from Duke: They struggled in their opener, and they’ve won three straight games since then. They’re scoring a whole lot of points. Gunnar Holmberg is a very, very good quarterback that’s got a good offensive group around him, because they’ve always had really good skill. Mataeo Durant’s a super running back. They’re improving every week on defense. So we’ll have our hands full. We’ve gotta play well. We’ll need that crowd lively and pumped up to pick our guys back up. You get beat by Georgia Tech, you pull into Kenan at 3:30 on Sunday morning, and it makes it a long weekend. So, [we’ve] gotta get over this one and get ready to go.
On his message to the fans: I’ve always told fans, ‘We need you when we need you.’ And we need you now, we need your help. And I know fans come, and they get up and down like we do. Well, we’ve all gotta pick ourselves back up and go back to work. The future of this program is in great shape. We’ve gotta keep getting better. This season’s sure not over, even though we’ve had two losses. And now, at this stage in our program, any loss is very, very disappointing. But we need [Kenan Stadium] full, and we need it loud. We need people excited so we can keep the Victory Bell in Chapel Hill.
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!
