Completely agree. And this really gets at what has irritated me so much about this whole thing from the get-go last December.
When we hired Mack Brown, we hired a coach who was way past his prime, had been fired from his most recent job in which he won a national championship and played for another, had not been coaching in many years, had exactly 0 other suitors interested in hiring him to coach, and was hired essentially because our biggest donors dictated to the athletics director. When we made the hire, the conventional wisdom being thrown around was that we were hiring this guy to come in and stabilize the program, rebuild the infrastructure, repair relationships, and then pass it off to the next younger coach in three years or so. We all know how that turned out: Mack never had any intention of passing it off after three years, and in doing so, completely squandered any of the goodwill, good relationships, and good recruiting that he was supposed to have brought to the program.
So what do we do after we fire him? We do the same exact damn thing! Except this time, we let the politicians get involved and we let the board of trustees go rogue and we allow our search to become an entire national laughing stock shitshow and we completely alienate our AD’s top two candidates and we completely squander our opportunity as quite literally the single best open job on the market, in order to hire and pay ungodly money to… you guessed it…a coach who was way past his prime, had been fired from his most recent job at which he won six championships, was not currently coaching, had exactly 0 other suitors interested in hiring him to coach.
My frustration stems from the fact that the powers that be in charge at UNC, and a not insignificant portion of our donors and fans, apparently have so little imagination or understanding of how to conduct a coaching search and make a coaching hire. When someone as accomplished as Mack Brown or Bill Belichick is available, and quite literally nobody else is making an attempt to hire them, and they are in their late 60s or early 70s and years past the prime of their careers, it should give you pretty strong pause to stop and think, you know what, maybe there is a reason why nobody else has tried this! But UNC is always, always, always much more interested in the style over substance and winning the headlines instead of winning on the field. So here we are, stuck in yet another coaching experiment that is failing and will most likely continue to fail in the long run.
I know I'm probably beating a dead horse at this point and I know my viewpoint is probably getting tiresome and irritating to folks, and for that I do apologize. But I'm just coming at this as a passionate but frustrated UNC football fan who truly believes our program has immense potential but who believes that there are institutional players who can never get out of their own way to allow the program to flourish.
