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, th.
