Mack Brown has seen a lot in his 30-plus year head coaching career.

From winning a national title at Texas, sending countless players to the NFL and being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, there isn’t much the North Carolina coach hasn’t experienced when it comes to football.

Off the field, however, Brown and the rest of the world have never experienced anything like what is going on right now with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This has all happened so quickly it feels like to me we’ve been doing this for eight weeks and it’s been about 10 days to two weeks,” Brown said during a virtual press conference March 23.

The closest event Brown can compare this one to is the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Brown was in his fourth year at Texas at the time and, just three days before, had beaten UNC, 44-14, to improve to 2-0 on the season.

And, while the coronavirus pandemic is a different situation entirely, they do draw some comparisons in Brown’s mind.

“I think the only thing that I could relate to that is similar to this, especially when it started, was 9/11,” Brown said. “We had President (George W.) Bush’s twin daughters on the campus at the University of Texas and we didn’t know. Nobody knew at that time what was going to happen, so there was a real panic over will the university be blown up? Would the capital of Texas be blown up? Were they after President Bush?”

Even with all the uncertainty the United States was facing as a country in the aftermath of 9/11, the attacks didn’t stop Brown’s Texas Longhorns from playing just 11 days later. It didn’t completely halt sports around the globe like what’s taking place right now.

Yet, like with anything that happens in life, Brown is looking for whatever positives may eventually come from this.

He’s recently taken up walking around his neighborhood every day and has noticed more parents and their kids out riding bikes, shooting hoops or tossing around a football. He thinks this situation is helping to bring families closer because they’re constantly together at home now.

Just like so many others, Brown is seeing things from a new perspective and is hopeful future generations will be better prepared to deal with a situation like this because of what the world is currently experiencing.

“Hopefully, we’ll learn enough about this virus that we can be more prepared next time something comes up because we’re going to have crisis in our society moving forward,” Brown said. “Our children and our grandchildren, they will see different sides of things than we do.”

Another more direct positive Brown and his staff have found is on the technological side. The coaches have been using Zoom, which is an online video conferencing service that allows them to communicate with the players via video chat. This has made it easier for everyone within the program to stay in touch as they are currently scattered across the country and is a tool Brown thinks can even help them in the future.

“It’s forcing all of us, meaning me and our staff, to research more electronic situations like being able to Zoom with our team,” Brown said. “This will help us on spring break and in the future there will be times that we can use pieces like this that we wouldn’t have known about until this came up.”

Brown believes his players being forced to adjust and still excel will have a lasting effect.

“From another standpoint, players are having to learn to go to school online,” he said. “They may want to do this in their graduate work, maybe they can do this while they’re playing pro football. So, there’s some things we’ll take out of this.”

The current state of affairs isn’t ideal, but Brown has found to positives that could have a lasting effect.