UNC football coach Mack Brown joined Ron Stutts this morning for “Mondays with Mack,” presented by Chapel Hill Tire. Read his entire interview below:
It’s a very special military bowl edition of Mondays with Mack. Coach, congratulations for reaching one of your season’s goals: earning a bid to play Temple on December 27th in Annapolis. I know that everybody is excited about this.
Ron, we really are. When we met the players about a year ago for the first time, we told them not to plan on being home for the holidays and then we had to beat our rival NC State to do that. So for the guys to win the last two games of the season and dominate both of them, they were very proud. And they’re excited about going to Annapolis for the Military Bowl.
They’re excited about playing Temple that they feel like obviously is a very good opponent with an 8-4 record. So things are good right now and they’re practicing hard.
How do you and your staff and your players use all this extra practice time before going into actual game preparation?
What we do is have pretty much a spring practice while we’re here, Ron. We started on Saturday. We had a lot of recruits in with signing day coming up Wednesday. We practiced yesterday afternoon around graduation.
Some of our seniors walked, we were so proud of them and didn’t get to practice, but we’re working a lot of the young guys this week. So we’ll practice again this morning. We’ll practice tomorrow. We’ll take off signing day on Wednesday and let the guys get a little rest for their legs. Then we’ll practice Thursday, we’ll practice Friday morning. They’ll actually go home and then meet us up to practice in D.C. on the 23rd.
Mack, in achieving bowl eligibility, what else did that great win, that dominating second half you had against North Carolina State tell you about this Tar Heel football team?
I think we’re learning how to win Ron. That’s the most important thing. We lost so many close games and then we won so many close games, but we were sitting there in some of these games and just couldn’t put them away.
Virginia Tech, we had opportunity after opportunity to finish and we did in Pittsburgh. We had a 3rd and 15 in overtime and we didn’t stop them. So weirdly enough, Mercer was not a great team, but our team had that game. They were prepared. They played really well. They dominated the game from the first snap. A lot of guys got to play. They had fun, they relaxed.
I think that really helped them when we beat NC State so much because they’re starting to understand what it takes to win, but they’re also starting to have a little fun and gaining confidence.
It’s really cool that you were able to tell them to not plan on being home for the holidays. What are your actual travel plans for the game, including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself?
The guys have an option that they can either fly up or they can drive up or a bunch of them get in the van and they get a little mileage for going up so they can make some money that way, Ron. So we just tell them that they need to be there by five o’clock on the 22nd and then we’ll practice on the 23rd and that’ll be like a Tuesday practice leading into a Friday game. So we’ll have a normal week’s practice and that’ll all be about Temple when we get there.
Well, getting to the opponent, the Owls, you mentioned are a pretty good football team. They finished the regular season 8-4 and are pretty well known for their defense. What special challenges does Temple present?
Rod Carey is the coach who was an assistant for Dave Doeren at Northern Illinois. They do a great job with their defense though they’ve always talked about being “Temple Tough.”
When you start looking at who they are, the single digit numbers have been their toughest players and that that’s a tradition that they have at Temple. So when our fans see single digits, they know these guys are great players and none better than the No. 9 Quincy Roche who was the defensive player of the year and the American conference, he’s a great player.
But these guys had a really close call with Top 25 Cincinnati. They beat Memphis. So they’re a quality opponent. They won eight games. At the end of the year, all the power ratings had them rated over us. So we know we’ll have our hands full.
Now if you can’t mention the names of commits, how excited are you about recruiting and the early signing day coming up on Wednesday?
I am really excited, Ron. These coaches have worked so hard for the year that they’ve been here. Last year’s class, we really saved a class and had a good class. Not a great class, but this year’s class will be probably a top 15, but definitely a top 20 class.
We feel good about who’s gonna sign on Wednesday and it just keeps it rolling. It’s funny, we’ve gotten good enough some of these great programs are already starting to talk about me being too old and they leave in and all that kind of stuff. So we’re getting negative recruiting from top programs in our first year. So that always is a good sign.
Well, you are the only active Hall of Fame coach. So at any rate, I wanted to say congratulations on your contract rollover, extending it for another year. You and Sally must really like being back here in Chapel Hill.
We’re loving it. We’ve had a great year. It’s so much fun to be back in Chapel Hill and be around so many friends and we’ve made new friends and renewed over relationships. The other thing is that we’ve had six bad days and that’s the six losses. That’s it. Everything else has been great since we’ve been back.
Hopefully we’ll start having a lot fewer of those and to see the smiles on these guys’ faces and to see what they’ve accomplished and see how close we were on so many other things. We’ve got to win this game next week and make sure that we send the seniors out with a winning season and a catalyst for moving this program forward.
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