UNC football coach Mack Brown joined Ron Stutts this morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire. Read his entire interview below:
Coach, I’m looking forward to talking to you. Just wanted to say congratulations on that big win.
Thank you, Ron. It’s a lot of fun to win. It’s hard to win, and it’s also a lot of fun to beat your rival. So we have a whole month of rivals here with NC State last Saturday, at Virginia this week, at Duke next week, and Wake Forest coming in in three weeks. So it should be a really fun month, but it’s really proud of the guys. They played hard. They played well. I also felt like both teams handled themselves with a lot of class. There wasn’t a lot of chippiness and pushing and shoving and mouthing. I thought it was a clean game. So proud of the way both teams handled all of the rivals.
Certainly the beginning of a tough stretch here for Carolina, Coach. What was your feeling before the game on Saturday on our readiness to play?
Well, I thought we were ready to play. It’s weird. I’ve tried to figure out what happened at Florida State, like all of us. And I think we were ready to play at Florida State. We weren’t as focused. And when we got hit in the mouth with the block punt and the interception for a touchdown, we didn’t respond quickly. But if you aren’t ready to play, you couldn’t come back and play so well in the he second half, but then we still dropped some balls at the end of the game. So I totally get it — you’re in shape, obviously excited to play. You’re playing hard as a team, but you gotta be physical every week. You gotta have fun. This is still a game, but at the same time, you’ve got to stay focused. And when you’re dropping balls or having a punt blocked or throwing to the wrong people, you’re probably not as focused as you needed to be.
Well Mack, from jump on Saturday, Carolina came out and dominated from the very first drive of the game where you held them to a three and out. It was kind of a weird first half, dominating all the stats, but only leading 17-7. How did you approach it at halftime?
Well, I told the guys that I thought they were playing really, really well. They’re playing hard. They were having fun. We just need to finish things and also told them that that was a bad series by our defense when NC State to get the length to the field and scored right up before the half, but then a great series for our offense with 50-something seconds left to drive down the length to the field and kick a 40-yard field goal to finish the half and take momentum.
And we had the ball to start the second half. So we also felt like we needed to get something early in the second half. And we made a first down. When we came back out, they stopped us, we punted, but then we forced the turnover. Tyrone Hopper tips the ball, Chaz Surratt intercepts it. And then we go into to get an easy one. And then the dam broken and we started doing things like we needed to at will, but we over-threw Michael Carter on that last drive, right before the half. We had a holding penalty. We could have had another 10 points stuck in there.
Michael Carter and Javonte Williams had another great game. When you got to know them after taking this job, how good did you think those two guys could be?
Well, actually, in my TV job, the day I took the job, I asked about by, I didn’t know their names, but I said is number eight (Carter) still coming back? Because he was really good. So it was fun to watch him. And Javonte was more of a short yardage line guy when we got here. So we didn’t know as much about him, but they are developing into the maybe the best combination of running backs in the country and really proud of them and for our fans. They’re better people than they are players. They’re great players, but they’re better people. And that makes it special as well.
Your defense on Saturday really stood up against North Carolina State. Talk about your defense, if you would.
Yes. Defense is tough. Modern day, you look at defense use across the country. It’s nearly, if they force a turnover or force a field goal, it’s a win because people are giving up so many points, defensively. And I think it’s because the rules offensive to having more success than defense. Right now, we’ve got the RPO’s, which are the run pass options. And they’re really impossible to stop if the offense execute some well. So our defense just decided we were going to do a better job against the run and the last couple of weeks. And we held NC State to only 34 yards rushing. We had three sacks for turnovers, so that that’s a great day for the defense of any camp, but especially in this modern times.
And only about 3,500 people in the stands on Saturday. I guess you could say it’s hard to get a home field advantage under those circumstances, but it was really cool how the players went over to the students before the fourth quarter. How do you get the emotion that you talk about so much?
You just have to play, Ron. 2020 is different for all of us. And it’s so crazy that the guys have to play because they love to play. We miss the fans, what a great atmosphere Virginia Tech would have been and what a great atmosphere Saturday with NC State would have been to two rival games as such a packed house, pretty days, fun days. And we’re missing that. We need to get all this over with and get everybody healthy and get our fans back in the stands. But right now we’ve told the players, all those fans are here. They’re just having to be at home to watch while they feel like they’re in the stadium. And we’ll get back to normal, hopefully here pretty soon.
Hopefully soon. How beneficial was it to play so many reserves in the fourth quarter? And even in a little bit of the third quarter and in a game that you had in hand.
It’s one of the things we think we’ve just got to start doing. We miss spring practice like everybody else, but we missed our Charlotte game. And we thought that might’ve been a game where we could have played some of the younger guys. And we said the biggest thing we needed to improve defensively, especially from last year to this year is depth and quality depth. And we haven’t been able to do that. We played 66 guys on Saturday, that helps team morale. And it definitely helps your depth and makes you feel better about your progress moving forward. So we’ve got to continue to try to do that. It’s hard to get those guys work when you’re not beating people badly. So and again, Saturday, it gave us a chance to get guys really quality work against a good rival.
I want to ask you about the Cavaliers in just a moment here, but the first time you were here, you talked a lot about winning the state championship and this season, you have a chance to do that. How important is that still to you?
Right, it’s really important. And the state championship was a caption to say that if you don’t beat all the teams at home, how do you expect to start being a national program? You need to dominate your own state. And in our state, we’ve gotten good teams. We’ve got good coaches. NC State’s had some injuries the last couple of years, a lot like Coach [Larry Fedora] did here in his last two. So that’s been tough for [Dave Doeren], but he’s done a great job over there. David Cutcliffe and Dave Clawson are two of the best coaches in the country and their programs are always going to play well. So we’re going to have to do a great job here over the next three weeks because we know those teams will be well-coached, there’ll be prepared and they would like to beat the Tar Heels for sure.
Well, first of all, before you get to playing another in-state rival, you go to Virginia for another nationally televised game at night, and the Cavaliers looked a lot better against Miami. What do you have to do to win that game and keep it rolling?
Virginia is well coached with Bronco Mendenhall. They’re going to play hard there. They haven’t had the success they wanted this year because they lost their quarterback. And we all know when you lose your quarterback, it puts you in a different spot, but they’ve got eight seniors on defense. They play really, really hard. They’re well coached and be excited about playing us, Ron. So this will be a challenge very much like Florida State. You gotta go on the road, you got to play at night, it’s going to be cold. They’re going to have nothing to lose and they’re going to turn it loose and get after us. And, and we’ve just got to continue to improve and keep playing well.
Well Coach, I know it’s going to be a hard week of practice this week getting ready for the Cavaliers again. Congratulations on last Saturday’s win and good luck to the ‘Heels on Saturday night.
Thank you, Ron. Thanks for having me.
Featured image via ACC Media
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