Mack Brown gone - will not return after 2024 season

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Peppers49 said:
I was being sarcastic. You’re the one that randomly posted the score in the first place lol.
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It wasn't random. It was in direct response to you saying to me, "You’re the one that doesn’t know anything about college football. JMU lost their coaching staff and all of their good players to the transfer portal. Don’t equate 23 JMU to 24 JMU. They aren’t the same team at all." I guess JMU 2023 would have won 95-7.
 
LosPollosHermanos said:
It wasn't random. It was in direct response to you saying to me, "You’re the one that doesn’t know anything about college football. JMU lost their coaching staff and all of their good players to the transfer portal. Don’t equate 23 JMU to 24 JMU. They aren’t the same team at all." I guess JMU 2023 would have won 95-7.
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What I said about JMU is objectively true. The fact that they crushed a doormat Mac team like Ball State doesn’t change anything.
 
Peppers49 said:
What I said about JMU is objectively true. The fact that they crushed a doormat Mac team like Ball State doesn’t change anything.
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Must be helluva good coach that lost all their good players to the transfer portal and then drops 133 points in two weeks on anybody.

I know he'd turn us down anyway.
 
Flipping channels and noticed Minnesota (at home) is giving #4 Penn State all they want. Tied 10 all now.

And to think UNC went there a couple months ago and beat these Gophers in their house. Now look where we are…
 
I watched a video summary of Mack's postgame press conference. I hadn't watched one all year, but he looked bad. And I don't mean bad because we just lost a game bad, but he doesn't look healthy - he had no energy, no pep, and he very much looked and sounded his age, imo. And what he said was mostly a bunch of cliches thrown together. He really does just need to retire and hang it up, because at least visibly, he seems done. His fire for the game is just gone, and he's just going through the motions now.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
I watched a video summary of Mack's postgame press conference. I hadn't watched one all year, but he looked bad. And I don't mean bad because we just lost a game bad, but he doesn't look healthy - he had no energy, no pep, and he very much looked and sounded his age, imo. And what he said was mostly a bunch of cliches thrown together. He really does just need to retire and hang it up, because at least visibly, he seems done. His fire for the game is just gone, and he's just going through the motions now.
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I watch most of them and after wins he has a lot more pep in him. Today’s game was just beyond terrible and he knew it.

I do think it time for him to hang it up. It would be wonderful if he announced tomorrow or Monday at the latest that he was retiring. Give the players an extra lift for the State game.
 
From a USA Today article today:

Beneath Mack Brown’s incomparable charm and irresistible folksiness lies a cold-blooded, calculating politician with an ego the size of Texas.

That’s not a criticism, but rather a compliment. You have to be incredibly talented not just as a football coach, but as a human being, to pull off what Brown has pulled off over a 40-year career. And we’re not talking about winning a national championship in 2005.

At 73 years old, long past the point where his contemporaries have either quit or been pushed out of their last coaching jobs, Brown still thinks he’s the best person on Planet Earth to be the head football coach at North Carolina.

He’s wrong, of course. Incredibly wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, as Saturday’s 41-21 loss to Boston College showed.

And yet, Brown is apparently going to run the same play he did 11 years ago when it was obvious to everyone but him that it was over at Texas. Instead of bowing out gracefully and handing off to the next generation, Brown is going to force North Carolina to fire him.

Will they? Who knows. But a report this week from CBS Sports laid out how Brown has been telling people that he plans to return in 2025. And in an interview with Sirius XM, Brown framed his thoughts on retirement through the lens of helping the young people in his program.

"When I see one with his head down or he’s got some joy because his sister won a contest or won a basketball game or he lost a girlfriend or flunked a test or dropped a ball on Saturday, that's my purpose,” he said. “My purpose is to fix him and try to help him get to a better place.”

Brown continued: “There will be a day I wake up and say, ‘You know what? Somebody else should be doing this.’ And I haven’t gotten to that yet.”

It's a compelling story, but it's also nonsense. If Brown really believes his purpose in life isn’t to win football games but to impart life lessons and inspire teenagers to do great things in life, there are multiple outlets for him that don’t require finishing ninth in the ACC or collecting a $5 million annual salary.

It’s harsh, but true. Given all he’s accomplished and how much money he’s made in coaching, Brown shouldn't need to be nudged into retirement. If he could step outside himself for even a second and see the reality of where he is in his life, and where North Carolina’s program has been under his leadership since coming out of the TV booth in 2019, it would be a no-brainer.

But old men clinging to power, even when all the evidence suggests they should hand it off and spend the rest of their days enjoying the spoils of a life’s work, is a tale as old as time. Brown, sadly, is no exception.

North Carolina is 6-5 and hasn’t moved the needle much since he came back to the sidelines five years ago. The program is stagnant. His second stint with the Tar Heels wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success. There is enough data to suggest that North Carolina needs to thank Brown for his service and move on.

But there’s no easy way to do that when Brown is making it clear that he’s not going to play ball. Either North Carolina’s administration is going to have to do something really ugly now, or Brown is going to delay the inevitable by another year...That’s why the Tar Heels are No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which programs are feeling the most angst.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
From a USA Today article today:

Beneath Mack Brown’s incomparable charm and irresistible folksiness lies a cold-blooded, calculating politician with an ego the size of Texas.

That’s not a criticism, but rather a compliment. You have to be incredibly talented not just as a football coach, but as a human being, to pull off what Brown has pulled off over a 40-year career. And we’re not talking about winning a national championship in 2005.

At 73 years old, long past the point where his contemporaries have either quit or been pushed out of their last coaching jobs, Brown still thinks he’s the best person on Planet Earth to be the head football coach at North Carolina.

He’s wrong, of course. Incredibly wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, as Saturday’s 41-21 loss to Boston College showed.

And yet, Brown is apparently going to run the same play he did 11 years ago when it was obvious to everyone but him that it was over at Texas. Instead of bowing out gracefully and handing off to the next generation, Brown is going to force North Carolina to fire him.

Will they? Who knows. But a report this week from CBS Sports laid out how Brown has been telling people that he plans to return in 2025. And in an interview with Sirius XM, Brown framed his thoughts on retirement through the lens of helping the young people in his program.

"When I see one with his head down or he’s got some joy because his sister won a contest or won a basketball game or he lost a girlfriend or flunked a test or dropped a ball on Saturday, that's my purpose,” he said. “My purpose is to fix him and try to help him get to a better place.”

Brown continued: “There will be a day I wake up and say, ‘You know what? Somebody else should be doing this.’ And I haven’t gotten to that yet.”

It's a compelling story, but it's also nonsense. If Brown really believes his purpose in life isn’t to win football games but to impart life lessons and inspire teenagers to do great things in life, there are multiple outlets for him that don’t require finishing ninth in the ACC or collecting a $5 million annual salary.

It’s harsh, but true. Given all he’s accomplished and how much money he’s made in coaching, Brown shouldn't need to be nudged into retirement. If he could step outside himself for even a second and see the reality of where he is in his life, and where North Carolina’s program has been under his leadership since coming out of the TV booth in 2019, it would be a no-brainer.

But old men clinging to power, even when all the evidence suggests they should hand it off and spend the rest of their days enjoying the spoils of a life’s work, is a tale as old as time. Brown, sadly, is no exception.

North Carolina is 6-5 and hasn’t moved the needle much since he came back to the sidelines five years ago. The program is stagnant. His second stint with the Tar Heels wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success. There is enough data to suggest that North Carolina needs to thank Brown for his service and move on.

But there’s no easy way to do that when Brown is making it clear that he’s not going to play ball. Either North Carolina’s administration is going to have to do something really ugly now, or Brown is going to delay the inevitable by another year...That’s why the Tar Heels are No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which programs are feeling the most angst.
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That says it perfectly.
 
The ONLY good thing about Lee Roberts appointment is that he is not at all connected to the Carolina Way for football
Having said that I assume he does what Art Pope tells him to do in this matter . Now I can not imagine Art Pope likes Mack-they are like two different ends of the spectrum . One is a pretty boy politician. The other is an ugly shabby looking gut that buys politicians.
Now I don't know where Art wants to spend his political capital Good chance it is on "steering" the UNC curriculum-not some freaking football coach
 
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mpaer said:
The ONLY good thing about Lee Roberts appointment is that he is not at all connected to the Carolina Way for football
Having said that I assume he does what Art Pope tells him to do in this matter . Now I can not imagine Art Pope likes Mack-they are like two different ends of the spectrum . One is a pretty boy politician. The other is an ugly shabby looking gut that buys politicians.
Now I don't know where Art wants to spend his political capital Good chance it is on "steering" the UNC curriculum-not some freaking football coach
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Keep in mind, though, that Art Pope invested a ton of money into Carolina football in the early-mid 90's specifically when Mack was here the first time. The Pope Box and the Kenan Football Center projects occurred largely due to his support.
 
I still feel 99.99% certain that Mack is done. Just hope he can motivate the team to get up emotionally for one last game. That’s obviously been a huge problem for Mack’s teams to do consistently during his second stint, but I feel like if we come out with energy that at least somewhat matches State, we can beat them easily. As bad as we’ve looked this season, they’ve looked even worse. You can bank on them playing hard in this game though. With that in mind, we can’t come out sloppy/go through the motions and still expect to win like we did against Wake. They could roll us again like last year in that scenario.
 
Mack will NOT retire. He will have to be forced out, fired. They may let him "resign" after doing so, but they will still have to pay off his contract. Thus a firing.

But I do not think Bubba has the balls, and he has the support of big donors. He is a far better politician and snake oil salesman than coach. But recruits aren't buying it anymore and want to develop and win.
 
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