UNC football head coach Mack Brown joined Aaron Keck Monday morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire.
The Tar Heels are now 2-0 on the young season, but the start has been far from perfect. Carolina was lucky to escape Boone with a win last Saturday, after giving up 40 fourth-quarter points to App State in a 63-61 win. Now, UNC heads down to Atlanta to face a Georgia State team it defeated soundly in Kenan Stadium last season.
Here are a few of Brown’s answers on various topics:
On the Appalachian State game: It’s one of the craziest games I’ve ever been involved with. The objective of the game is to win. Our guys did that. There’s so many teachable moments in this ballgame. Our offense played really, really well, and that was without our starting running back and two of our best receivers. And then defensively we didn’t start well, but [App State] had a new offensive coordinator, put in some new wrinkles and did some things to get us on our heels early. We came back and played really well for two quarters, and then just didn’t finish the game. And that’s what we’ve got to do, and we’ve got to get better on special teams, too. We did really well the first week. Last Saturday we were inconsistent. Noah Burnette kicked field goals really well, most of our kickoffs were good, but we had a kickoff return against us that was a critical play at the end of the game. And our punting was inconsistent, and hurt us with field position. The great thing is, you’ve got a lot of things to work on and you’re 2-0. I’m not sure last year’s team would’ve won this game.
On the fourth quarter: We were in complete control and we’re up by 20, and in a position to go ahead and make this a complete blowout. We’ve got to grow up. We just didn’t have enough about us. We come out and Drake Maye fumbled the ball. As well as he played, that changed the momentum of the game. We’ve got to step up and stop them right there, and they go score. And then we come back and we score in three plays, they come back and get the ball again. So our defense was out there too much in the fourth quarter. Both defenses got worn out. It was hotter than normal in Boone. It just ended up being a scoring fest in the fourth quarter, where whoever had the ball was gonna score. Then the craziness of the onside kick. We didn’t get the onside kick last year at NC State, so we were so excited about getting the onside kick, then you look up and here’s a guy running it in for a touchdown when we should’ve been falling down; the game’s over. There’s so many teachable moments and so many things that will make us better.
On the Georgia State game: We’ve got to go on the road to another team that’s the best team they’ve ever had in program history. There’s never been a Power 5 team [to] play at Georgia State. So like Appalachian State, it’ll be the biggest game in program history. [Georgia State head coach] Shawn Elliott, like [Appalachian State head coach] Shawn Clark is a product of Appalachian State and Jerry Moore. He’s gonna run the same offense that Appalachian State ran. They’re gonna run the same defense. And right now, I’m not sure that Georgia State doesn’t have a better team than Appalachian State, because they’re so good on defense. They gave South Carolina fits on Saturday night. South Carolina was down 14-12 some time in the third quarter and then had to come back and block two punts to have a chance to win the game. Once again, we better get ready to go. Got to put this one behind us, good and bad. Learn from it, move on and try to win number three.
On his message to the fans: Our fans were great in Boone. I was told it’s a harder ticket than the Notre Dame game. And we had a lot of fans there. There was so much talk about the 10,000 seats in the end zone; it was full of our fans. So thank goodness there were seats that were added that we could buy tickets. Our fans were loud, they were positive. And we’ve got lots of fans in Atlanta, so we need all the Atlanta fans to come out this weekend as well. This is a fun team to watch, and they’re only gonna get better. They’re really young and inexperienced, and games like Saturday are so valuable for them to learn.
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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I’m 60 years old and my high school didn’t have a football team, and I broke my shoulder severely in 1979 and finally had surgery on it in 2010, but now it’s back to where I can’t even throw a ball of any kind over my head, so I probably wouldn’t throw for more than 300 yards against UNC, but give me a middle school team and I’d like to see.