Mack Brown sees North Carolina’s appearance in the Orange Bowl as a reward for his team and validation for their hard work and the considerable progress the program has made in the 25 months since he was hired.

Brown met with the media via zoom Sunday afternoon to participate in the first of several Orange Bowl press conferences that will take place over the next 12 days, which is when the No. 13 Tar Heels will face No. 5 Texas A&M on Jan. 2 in Miami.

This will be Brown’s first appearance in the Orange Bowl as a head coach but his third overall, as he was an assistant on the Oklahoma staff that played in the game in 1985 and in 1982 when he was on the LSU staff.

Jimbo Fisher coached two Florida State teams in the Orange Bowl, but this is A&M’s first appearance in the game in 77 years.

UNC is 8-3 while Texas A&M is 8-1.

Above is Brown’s 20-minute Q&A session and below are some notes and pulled quotes from what he had to say:

*Brown recognizes the Orange Bowl as one of the more prestigious games in college football and carries tremendous historical significance. It’s also one more thing he can add to his done list in this sport.

“It's such an honor to be chosen,” Brown said. “You always want to have a good match-up when you're in a bowl game and we got one of the best in the country. It's feasible that A&M could have been chosen in the top 4 today because they've sure earned that right and were in a long hard discussion last night and this morning I'm sure, but our guys are very excited to be where we were two years ago to now, getting to play in a January 2 bowl in Miami, in the Orange Bowl, is really exciting for us.

“A&M has been in this neighborhood before. This is new for us. So we're not familiar with this, but we're learning each week something new. We played Notre Dame down to the end and didn't do well offensively the second half, and then we learned enough from that that we were able to beat Miami No. 10, so this will be another great challenge for us to finish our season.”

*This is a reward to the seniors, Brown said, and a testament to their effort since the day he was hired. Many could have gone elsewhere but stuck it out, gave him a chance, and after going 6-21 in the 27 games before Brown was hired, that Tar Heels are playing in one of the most prestigious bowls.

“Those seniors could have left when I got here. They decided to stay,” Brown said. “They fought through a year last year, and we had to win our last game last year to get to a bowl game, and then they go to the Military Bowl and they win, and then coming back this year we didn't know, our expectations were probably better than our experiences at that time, and we got rated fifth in the country before everybody was playing, so that was a little facetious, but it was what it was, and we've been very honest with them.

“And then we are a team that just keeps getting better. We've gotten better and better each week. They haven't quit. They've played hard each week. When they've been behind, they've come back. All of that is talking about senior leadership and the way that those guys have stepped up and made sure.”

*As for recruiting, there’s no doubt this will help as it, once again, validates what the staff is doing.

“As far as our program, recruiting is going really, really well,” Brown replied. “This only shows people that this North Carolina program at this time is different. We have a chance to accomplish things because the league is different than when I was here before. It was the BCS. It was Florida State and the rest of us. And at one time it was Clemson and the rest of us.

“But now we've got Clemson who's been the dominant program in this league. We've got Notre Dame who came in for this year and dominated. But everybody understands there is a path now to get to the College Football Playoff, where before there wasn't.

“We've got one of the best teams in the country in front of us in Clemson, but all of us in this league know that we've got to really pick our game up before we can have a chance to beat a Clemson, and to do that you've got to learn to play with the Notre Dames, the Miamis last weekend and then the Texas A&Ms in this game.

“I'm really excited not only that we got here, the publicity that it will give us for recruiting, but also the challenge of playing such a great team because our guys need to see what it's like to be the fifth team in the country, and we'll get that experience here in a couple weeks.”

*Brown was asked if A&M belongs in the CFP.

“Does A&M deserve to be in? Absolutely,” Brown said. “If there were five or six teams they would be in, but who do you take out?

“I sat there all the time and tried to make those decisions, and you'll sit there and think you know what you're talking about and then somebody will give another side of it and say, yeah, that's true. But the committee does a great job of figuring it all out, and we're just lucky to be in the Orange Bowl playing a great opponent with Jimbo.”

*Texas has long had two primary rivals, Oklahoma and Texas A&M. Brown is 10-4 all-time versus the Aggies, but the most vivid memory had little to do with an actual game, it was a tradition at A&M that had a tragic ending.

Every year, the Aggie Bonfire was part of a tradition leading up to the annual football game with Texas, where students built a massive bonfire that eventually grew so tall the school administration limited it to 65 feet in the 1960s. But in 1999, the bonfire collapsed killing 12 students and injuring 27.

Brown recalled the incident during his presser Sunday.

“Absolutely, and it's the bonfire event, the 10 days there. I remember when we lost 12 young people that were working on the bonfire, and the bonfire fell in on them. I remember driving to work on a Thursday 10 days or a week before the ballgame. It was the open date before the A&M game on Thanksgiving, and hearing on the radio that 12 young students at A&M had lost their lives working on a traditional bonfire.

As a parent, it just took me back, and I stopped and I really started crying. I heard on the radio that parents call this number to check on your kids, and then they said, the lines are just overloaded, so you're going to have to drive to College Station, and I thought, you're going to have to drive to see if your kids are alive, and then I called Sally and said, ‘What do we do,’ and she said, ‘All we can do is pray for the families that have lost their children; but there's some others hurt; let's start a blood drive.’

“So, we actually started a blood drive that afternoon and there were Houston and Texas Tech and TCU fans and Baylor fans and A&M fans, and R.C. Slocum to this day is a dear friend of mine and we all tried to pull together and said should we have a game or not, and then we canceled our pep rally and had a memorial with a lot of A&M students.

“And then it was an unbelievable day at the game because I thought we probably shouldn't play the game and I told R.C. whatever you all want we'll do, and then not only did we play the game but I think we were ahead 16-0 at halftime, they came back and beat us 21-16 right at the end and I thought that's one of the few times in my life that it was probably a really good healing experience for A&M, so I'm not sure that it wasn't best for them to have won that game.

“But that's a memory that every year at Thanksgiving I think about those families and those kids that were lost.”