UNC football coach Mack Brown joined Ron Stutts this morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire. Read his entire interview below:
In the game against Notre Dame on Friday night, your offense started out like a house of fire and then things changed and all in all a good effort against a very talented and experienced football team.
Yes, Ron let’s take the positives first. Yeah, the defense played the best it’s played all year against the best team we played all year by far, and I thought the kids were ready to play. We still didn’t get enough sacks because Ian Book is really, really hard to tackle and we’re not forcing turnovers, but the defense kept us in the game. The second half special teams were by far the best they’ve been all year. We had great field position at times because of our special teams. And then they backed us up inside the five, twice with their special teams. So I thought those really came out even, we might’ve even won special teams. The second half we felt like we were going to win the game very honestly looking at it that their front seven played better than our front seven.
They were more physical than we were the second half. And then they shut down one of the best offenses in the country. And that’s what a great defense does. So, number one, I’m glad that our expectations are much higher now than they were when we got here because people thought we had a chance to win this game. And we’re disappointed we did. And they may be the best team in the country, if not, they’re one of two. So that shows us also where we need to get so our players, I said, when you’re practicing, practice to beat Notre Dame, don’t practice the beat anybody else, because that’s the best team that we’ve played since we’ve been here along with the Clemson team last year. That’s where we’ve got to get. So give them credits. They played really well. They were ready to play. They’re so big. They’re so physical. And they just beat us down offensively because they kept rotating really good players on defense.
Which I got to say, your defense came so close so many times to sacking Book and he just miraculously pulled a Houdini act. But you know, if only a few of those things could have changed, it could have been different.
And that’s who he is. I think he should be up for the Heisman. He’s won 29 games and lost three in his career. And so many times we had him sacked. In fact, one of the two balls he threw under handed down the field, Chazz Surratt hit his arm while he was throwing it. And he still completed the thing. So give him credit. We had our hands on him a bunch. He slippery. We knew that we had to tackle him to win the game. And he kept escaping.
Ben Kiernan’s punting, you mentioned special teams, but that young man continues to do an outstanding job when he gets a chance to punt, because your offense doesn’t give him an opportunity to punt very often.
No, and he punted the ball across the field to keep it away from a good returner from them. He’s got such a strong leg. I think he averaged like 50-yards a punt. He had a 60-something yarder. He is a weapon for us. And like you said, we haven’t punted that much this year, but in a game like that one where field position was so important, it was key to keep them backed up.
Final score, 31-17 and a game that was actually closer than that final score would indicate despite the loss. What did your team gain from playing the game?
Right? And they will take confidence away from this and learn from it because they know now that that’s what one of the best teams in the country is like. And that that’s where we have to get. The other thing is I showed them a video that we had the ball with eight minutes left down seven with a chance to go score and win the game. We had the ball at the opponent 38-yard line with six minutes left with a chance to go win the game. And then we had them backed up with five minutes left at the 10-yard line when they had the long run off the goal line. So we had chance after chance after chance to win the game. And to know that we can be in that position against such a great team has to give our guys confidence when they look back at the game, this disappointment, yes. Different than the Clemson game last year, because we actually felt like in this one, we had a chance to win. And last year’s game, everybody was so shocked. We were in it that it of took us all back. But in this one, we, we knew we had a chance.
Coach, I want to talk about something else briefly here. I have to give you and your players kudos for displaying all those great messages on the backs of the jerseys instead of their names. Really cool, but being a head college football coach involves a lot more than just coaching the X’s and O’s?
Ron, it really does. This summer when there were a lot of racial unrest and the NBA was protesting and Major League Soccer was protesting, baseball was protesting, our kids and I sat down and basically said, well, what’s going on in our world? Why are there, there’s some people that are of color that are being killed more than white people. And what does this mean? And our friends are asking us to step up and use our platform. What should we do? And we talked about it. A lot of these young guys might not be drafted if they came out too strong or they might not get jobs because some of our boosters wouldn’t agree with their thoughts. So we did a few things. I did a video for them because it was them being able to speak through me. And then the second, and I’m not, I’m not looking for jobs and sure not gonna play in the NFL, I’m okay.
But the other part of that was that they wanted to do what the NBA was doing. And that was put the up saying a name, something on the back of their jerseys, one game. And we were going to do that for the Charlotte game. And then the Charlotte game was canceled and they asked for the Notre Dame game and some had peace. One young man had lost his dad. So he wanted to put his dad’s name on there from a couple of years ago. Some others had Bible verses, some had stuff about social injustice, some had things that were important to them. So we had a committee that approved it all from the administration, but at the same time we thought like that was a chance for them to have a voice.
It was all so very cool and thank you for that. With Western Carolina playing a partial season, what’s your approach to Saturday’s game, especially with Miami the following week, and also Saturday will be senior day. What do you have to say about those seniors of yours?
Yeah, that’s the number one thing is this week is about the seniors. The whole week is about the seniors. We build it around them. There’ll be some seniors that are graduating and want to play another year and aren’t playing much here. So they’ll go somewhere else to play as grad transfers. There’ll be some that have had a great career here and there. They’re going to want to finish it strong with Western and then Miami. And we were worried we might not have a senior day this year. So this is really good. And then the Sunday night after the Miami game, we’ll have our senior banquet. So we’re still going to have as much of a normal ending to their careers as we can possibly have in these crazy times. Western’s only playing three games this year, we’ll have better players than theirs. Our thing will be, we need to get ready to play and play our game and not talk about who we’re playing against. And that’s something we’ve got to learn to do each week.
Love what you’re doing with the program, everything headed in the right direction. And thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you, Ron. Hope everybody’s being safe out there after a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Featured image via ACC Media
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