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, it’s good to be back with you. And I know it seems like forever since we last talked. A heartbreaking loss to Virginia. What did you tell your team after that game and how in the world do you fill the time in between that game and this game coming up on Thursday night?
We told them, a couple of drives in the fourth quarter, a couple of plays in the fourth quarter and we’re undefeated so they’re working hard to get things done. They’ve had a streak over Pittsburgh. They’ve won six straight.
But it’ll be tough up there on a cold Thursday night, so we’re practicing early in the morning here so we can get prepared for this cold weather.
When did you actually start preparing the players specifically for the Panthers?
We started last week, last Tuesday. We gave them Sunday off after Virginia. Monday is their day off, and then we practiced really hard on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And we did a lot of basic fundamental stuff with the young ones.
But with the older ones, we’ve been working on Pittsburgh for about 10 days. They’re very complicated on defense. Pat Narduzzi, their head coach, came from Michigan state who’s known to be a tough football team. They’re number one in the conference against the run. They’re number one in the conference with sacks and usually that goes together.
They make it hard to run the ball and therefore hard to protect. So we’ll have to do a great job in both areas on Thursday night.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back and just ask you one question about the Virginia game. My question is Bryce Perkins — obviously a very talented guy — how did have so much success against Carolina beyond that great talent?
I think that when you go into a game like that, Ron, you gotta stop their best player and we didn’t. He made plays. We stopped him from running the ball most of the night, but he has a 65 yard run right after the half. That just killed us.
But he’s been hurt this year. He hasn’t had as good a year as he’s had last year. Against us last year, he put it together and he played great and he did the same last Saturday night. So we absolutely did not do a good job of stopping him.
We didn’t stop him in the run or the pass because he had the long run. He was the reason we lost the game.
Now for your team, is there such a thing as scoring too fast and not giving your defense enough rest on the sideline?
In this game, it really happened because we didn’t have the ball very often because they were crowding the line of scrimmage and we’ve got some fast receivers and Sam’s doing good job throwing the ball.
So we scored so quickly that I did think that we got tired some on defense. And one of the real deficiencies of this team is lack of depth. And when we don’t keep the ball, our defense wears down some. And then you’re trying to chase a tremendous player like a Perkins and it puts you in a bind.
Well, you’ve already mentioned that Pitt of course has lost to Carolina six straight years and it’s going to be a tough challenge no matter how you look at it. What do you have to do in Pittsburgh to make it seven in a row?
I think we’ve got to stay balanced on offense, Ron, which is one thing we’ve got to do is we can’t just give up on the run because they’re the number one run stop defense in the, in the conference. And in total defense, they’re two behind Clemson.
So these guys are really good and they’re 6-3. They’ve still got a lot to play for like we do. So it should be a great game.
But I think the most important thing, you gotta take your running games still on the road and your kicking game when you’re playing away from home and we can’t give up on that on a cold night, we’re going to have to still run the ball.
Well, besides being on national television, on ESPN and all the hype that goes along with that, do you really like playing a Thursday night game?
Well, I don’t because it disrupts your week. The good thing is it’ll give us 10 days to prepare for the next game and they usually have an open date before it. So the best thing about a Thursday night game this time of the year is it’ll give the kids some rest before and after the game as they head into senior day next weekend.
Well, it, it certainly seems a little strange for the season. It seems strange that we’ve had three fall Saturdays with no football. Does it seem weird to you?
Well, it really does. The Wake Forest game was supposed to be on a Thursday night. They moved it to Friday night.
And the challenge for our guys this this week, we’ll get back to Kenan Stadium about 4 a.m. on Friday morning and we’ll fully expect them to be in class on Friday. So that’ll be a challenge for these young guys.
But that’s what happens with the Thursday night game. You try to go to your Wednesday classes, you fly to Pittsburgh. If you play a quick game, come back and try to get to class on Friday.
Well, coach, is there anything else that our listeners need to know about this Pittsburgh team that you can a sum up in a, in about a minute here?
I don’t think so, Ron. It’ll just be a real physical ball game and our offensive line is getting more physical. I thought that they played really well against a tough Virginia defense. I did not think that our defensive front seven did near as good a job as they have.
We’ve lost so many guys in the secondary. We’ve got to play better at corner when people aren’t having the success running the ball that they need to, they’re just throwing fades and a back shoulder balls on our corners and our guys have to do a better job of defending that. We’ve worked really hard on that the last 10 days.
Coach, looking forward to the game on Thursday. Good luck and we appreciate your being with us this morning.
Thanks Ron, I have to say thank you to the fans. What a wonderful environment we’ve had. Every home game they have all come early. They’ve stayed until the last drive and every game come down to the last drive and I still think a lot of this team’s success and a lot of their success on the field and off the field in recruiting is because our fans have been so wonderful. So I just want to take a moment to say thank you to all the fans in Chapel Hill.
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