Mack Brown Interview (3/3/20)

College football Hall of Famer, Mac Brown, going to join us in just a couple of moments. His football team starting spring practice.

The big question, can Sam Howe do what he did in 2019, but elevate his play? Take it to another level, because I'm going to go ahead and fast forward the calendar six or so months from now. Heck, we'll just push it five months from now. We will have ACC football kickoff. We'll be in Charlotte.

We'll be preparing for the start of the year. They're going to ask the media to fill out a preseason poll. And of course, the Clemson Tigers with Trevor Lawrence coming back, Dabo Swinney, Travis Etienne returning to the team. They're going to be picked as the overwhelming, maybe unanimous winner of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But almost as sure as I am, that's going to happen. Clemson's going to be picked as the winner of the ACC. I feel almost as certain that the same thing is going to take place for the North Carolina Tar Heels in the Coastal Division.

Who else would it be? Virginia, they're losing Bryce Perkins. They're losing their best wide receiver Dubois. They're losing Bryce Hall at corner.

They kind of limped down the stretch. Pittsburgh, they're losing so much, including their quarterback. So in the Coastal, I don't really know another team that has as much positive momentum going their way than the North Carolina Tar Heels. And with Sam Howell, considering all the quarterbacks Mack Brown has worked with, that is a guy I'm fascinated to see how he improves from last year, what the next step in his progression is.

We're now being joined by the Hall of Famer Mack Brown. You're just one of those guests, coach, that we always look forward to chatting with, puts a smile on my face every time you're on the phone with us. We haven't talked to you since the season ended, now that spring balls began.

How much time did you get in the mountains this offseason? Well, Josh, we didn't get much time because you got to go back to work, go back and recruit. You've got, we're at a different place in our program now. The expectations are already elevated.

We're having a team meeting here at 515 today. We're going to talk to our guys about the difference in a year. And that right now we're talking about winning the Coastal. We're talking about competing with Clemson to win the conference championship. And last year we were talking about winning some games. So it's an exciting time at North Carolina. We're really having a lot of fun in the offseason.

When you're talking to your team coach, what do you think to give us the summation of what you're going to tell your guys? What is the difference between a year? Well, the difference is that we know each other. This time last year, we didn't even know who we were. We know that we can compete. We know that we can win. We know that we've got to take another step and start winning some of the, we won some of the close games last year at the end. We lost some. We lost a six overtime game. We lost an overtime game.

Those are games we have to win. So our expectation now is not to figure out each other's name and have their names on their helmet and not try to figure out what we've got to do to keep having penalties. What we've got to do to develop more discipline, what we've got to do to improve our facilities, the need to have our stands full.

A lot of those things, those boxes are checked. So now what we've got to do is figure out how to take what we were good at last year and develop more. We've got to develop better leadership because player led teams are really good teams.

Coach led teams are average. We've got to develop more depth. So we need you guys to step it up and play better. And we're getting ready to go to spring break next week. So they've got to take care of themselves because we start spring practice on Tuesday after we get back from spring break.

So we've got to be really mature and make good decisions as well. We've talked in the past, Coach, about your quarterback history working with a guy like Vince Young and Colt McCoy and following both of their careers at Texas. They progress so much year to year with the culmination being they're one of the best quarterbacks in the country when they finished up playing at Texas. And you've said that, Sam, how he's a special type of quarterback for you guys. So when you're speaking to him and you're looking at the tape and what he did in his first year as a true freshman, what's the next step in his development heading into year two?

The next step is to play better in every phase, get stronger, run better. When we lost Jase Ruder last year and Cade Fort and transferred, we couldn't run Sam. So Sam can be a real weapon when he's running the football, whether it's scrambling after there's something that's not open or whether it's a design run from Coach Longo. And at the same time, he was very accurate, but he missed some throws he wished he had back and probably held the ball too long and took some sacks.

So there are a lot of things that Sam can do to improve. And we'll have Jase Ruder this spring. We'll have Jacoby Crizzle this spring. We'll have Vincent Amendola this spring who is a walk on for us.

So we're going to be able to explore some new looking, good looking running plays with our quarterbacks on offense as well. It's North Carolina head coach Mac Brown with us here on Sports Hub Triad. See, you've spent so much time in Chapel Hill as the all time career wins leader in North Carolina football history. This week is a major week on the basketball front.

Tar Heels are playing Duke on Saturday. Do you have a story surrounding that rivalry on the basketball end that you can share? Maybe a firsthand experience or maybe a particular game you remember watching? Well, when you I was here with Coach Smith, obviously, and Coach Guthridge and even Coach Williams was an assistant when I was first here. So he's been a lifetime friend. And I miss very, very few games with our basketball team.

I love watching the guys play and I'll be there tonight pulling hard for them. And I think the biggest thing are all the things that I've learned from Coach Smith and Coach Guthridge and Coach Williams, and just watching them and their teams compete at such a high level. And we've shared ideas for years. And it's been a great experience for me for them to help us recruit. They sit down and talk to players before games.

And at the same time, not just help us recruit, but talk to me about things. One of the things I asked Coach Smith earlier is, why do you think you're so successful here? And he talked about playing time. And he said that when your backups are fresher than your starter and they can play as well, get the starter out, get the backup in. It helps you prevent injuries. It helps fatigue. It's better morale for recruiting. It just helps everybody. It gets guys ready to play when somebody leaves early for the NBA or the NFL.

So as small as that might seem, that's one thing that we've used for many, many years to help be successful. When Roy Williams passed Coach Smith on the North Carolina career wins list a few months ago, he just flatly denied any idea that he would be better than Coach Smith at anything because he feels that everything he does at North Carolina is an extension of what Coach Smith taught him. But since you got to know both of them, we know they're both great coaches, but how do you feel they're different coaches at all from somebody who's a Hall of Famer in his own right?

I think that they are very similar. And the guys that I learned from are guys that I emulate. And Coach Williams has done that a lot with Coach Smith.

But at the same time, they're a little bit different because they were raised different. But Roy Williams' story is one of the best in sports history. He was a walk-on on the basketball team. He leaves the basketball team to work as an official in the recreation office. And Coach Smith hires him back to work his camps, officiating in the summer. And then at some point, he hired him as the freshman coach. So he didn't have the easy way up. He didn't have the, I'm the great basketball player that somebody hired. He worked really, really hard and with a lot of confidence to work his way up. Coach never misses a football game because he was actually a high school football coach at one time, too.

So he's had a very unique background that makes him very special. It's Mack Brown, North Carolina head football coach with us here on Sports Hub Triad. I want to get to one newsworthy subject with you, something that basketball coaches have been talking about the last couple of weeks and football coaches in their own right to the NCAA. They are discussing the one time transfer proposal.

And quite frankly, it seems like something that's inevitable. We're going to have players transferred from one place to the other without the punishment of having to sit out a year. The ACC released a statement saying they're for this and some coaches across the country have expressed concern as to what it's going to look like, what the unwanted consequences are going to be if something like this passes. What is your feeling on the NCAA's one time transfer proposal? Well, Josh, first, I'm a 32 year head coach and I've always stood on the side of the player and you want what's best for the student athletes, period.

That's just who we are. And coach use can move at any time they want to. Players don't understand and I've talked to them about it that there's usually buyouts that make it a little bit more difficult for coaches to move than people think. So as much as I want players to be able to do exactly what they want, there's two concerns I have. One is that we don't want to make it so easy to transfer.

It's kind of like making divorce so easy that if you have a bad day with your wife, you just leave. So you don't want young guys that get mad at their coach and decide they're going in the transfer portal this afternoon. Because we're trying to build loyalty and we're trying to talk about guys not quitting. Stick with it.

Fight through it. And then if it doesn't work, you can look at transferring. But I hate the message that we're sending that it's so easy to quit and transfer now that you don't have to stay there and fight through some adversity.

Because they're going to have that in their lives later on. And I transferred. So after you transfer once, you're going to have problems at the other school too.

And then you can't transfer anymore. Secondly, I would like to think that if we're going to have the one transfer rule, then we should have it in the summer. And you can't go past June per se. Because then you start getting into the possibility of tampering with coaches if they lose a guy in spring practice. And the coach or the agent of the coach can contact the kid on another team and start talking to him about transferring. And you could actually have somebody transfer in August right before you started practice and play against him two weeks later or three weeks later in the third or fourth week of the season. So January is when I think you should be able to transfer.

And after that, you could look at it possibly as late as June. But if you're after spring practice, rosters are already submitted. And it makes it a very difficult thing for coaches to try to figure out how many guys it's safe to even play with in the fall. Coach, congratulations on the finish to last year in the bowl game. And on top of that, a great recruiting class you've brought in. I look forward to a future visit to talk about the guys you actually have playing for you this year. We'll have plenty of time to do that. But in the meantime, while your team's preparing for this coming season, I'm hoping you're preparing some dance moves as well, because it seems like you guys are going to have a lot of wins this year. Thank you, Josh. I think I've got a lot more work to do on my dance moves than we do with our team.

We've got a long way to go with our team. But my dance moves, even my wife says, how embarrassing. You need to either get better at it or quit doing it.

So that's bad when your own wife tells you that. You're the best coach. Thanks for doing this. Thanks, Josh. That is Mack Brown, North Carolina head football coach, on Twitter at Coach Mack Brown and his team already beginning spring practice. And March is one of those best months where you have football in the headlines a little bit. And of course, around here, college basketball is our primary focus. Up next, the most helpless place to be as a sports fan. This is the drive.