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CHAPEL HILL – North Carolina’s football program is going back to the basics.
That was the message from head coach Mack Brown on Tuesday afternoon, as he held a press conference in advance of the Tar Heels kicking off spring practice March 1.
Carolina finished last season 6-7 after opening the year ranked in everyone’s top 10. That lasted one game, and the Heels never found a groove of any kind the rest of the way. So Brown was very clear in articulating the need to return to approaching everything as his first two clubs after returning for a second run in Chapel Hill.
“We’re talking about going back and playing to a standard,” Brown said. “The first two years we played with a chip on our shoulder. We played hard, we overcame a lot of adversity, we came back in games, and had some super comebacks.
“And this year we had some of that, but we weren’t as consistent with who we wanted to be. So, we’re going to go back and create that edge and make sure that we’re not walking around and acting like we’ve just been to the Orange Bowl and we’re eighth in the country. Right now, we haven’t proven anything.”
And with that, the Hall of Famer said the most important words of his 57-minute presser: “We’re starting over as a program and we want to go back to the basics that we had that first year.”
What exactly does going back to the basics mean?
His first team in 2019 finished 7-6 winning its last three games. That was a huge success given Carolina managed only five wins combined over the previous two campaigns. The 2020 club went 8-4 and led Texas A&M in the fourth quarter of the Orange Bowl before falling.
Again, the Tar Heels took a sizeable step in the right direction toward achieving Brown’s stated mission of competing for something tangible nationally.
But then last year and the Virginia Tech game happened. Then Georgia Tech Happened. And then Florida State happened. And by the time the Heels walked off the field at Bank of America Stadium following another ugly loss, this time to South Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, Brown had more than seen enough.
He and the holdovers on his staff, plus newcomers Gene Chizik and Charlton Warren, aren’t tearing everything up and starting from scratch. The recipe is already in the program’s pantry. It just needs some dusting off and a new touch.
“I don’t think you go back as much as you shouldn’t have left,” Brown said. “We didn’t do a great job last year, I don’t think, as a staff or as a team of getting ready to play every week, of playing up to the standard we had the previous two years.”
Brown didn’t have many issues with his team’s focus and effort over the first two seasons, but that wasn’t the case last fall. He says the staff, coaches, and the players read the headlines and it got to them a bit too much. They sprinted before they could really run.
The staff should have handled replacing the key lost players to the NFL better than they did, Brown also said. They should have adjusted game plans and calls on the field, plus the psychology of a season of high expectations that seemingly went down the drain four hours after it formally commenced.
The Tar Heels rolled into Blacksburg for the opener to face a Virginia Tech team that had a coach on the hot seat and issues at various skill positions. But the Hokies hit the Heels right square in the mouth and it took Carolina a long time to respond. And by the time it closed in on flipping around the game, ills that lasted all season ended hopes of a comeback.
Sacks, turnovers, penalties, and general discombobulation spoiled that late effort at climbing out of a hole that proved too deep.
Brown said the loss lingered and affected psyche. But it was the loss at Georgia Tech that derailed pretty much everything.
UNC went to Atlanta still ranked and with all of its goals still intact, but the offense imploded in the first half and defense fell apart after halftime in a 45-22 loss to a team that finished the season with a 3-9 record and won once after destroying the Tar Heels.
“I thought that (Virginia Tech loss) lingered because it was a tough physical game and we lost late, and that took a lot of the air out of the “we’re number eight in the country,’” Brown said, also noting the team played well in its next two games, wins over Georgia State and Virginia, though the fans still griped about the performances.
“And then we absolutely lay an egg at Georgia Tech. And I thought that’s the one that killed us. We could have come back and overcome Virginia Tech, (but) Georgia Tech we were awful. And I don’t know why to this day.”
As part of the effort to avoid that happening again, in addition to some tweaks to the offensive approach and installing an entirely new defense under Chizik, Brown is also changing some other things.
“Last year at this time, we had a leadership committee that we appointed, and we did not feel like we had great leadership throughout all the season last year,” he said. “So, we’re working really, really hard to teach leadership.”
Part of that process is that player-led committee won’t be established until after spring. Brown wants the players to earn it on the field.
Brown didn’t keep any of his gear from the bowl game because of his team performance that afternoon. “I wasn’t proud,” he said. And that apparently wasn’t the only time.
Because of that, and the Heels skidded off track last fall, big changes are coming.
