CHAPEL HILL – Mack Brown has been in his new job as North Carolina’s head football coach for three months, and as he gets ready to kickoff spring practice Sunday, the Hall of Famer was clear about the decision he made last November to leave retirement and get back into the fray.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that I’m loving every minute of this,” he said at the outset of his pre-spring football press conference Friday at the Kenan Football Center. “The best thing for (wife) Sally and I was to be back in coaching. We missed the kids, we missed mentoring the kids (and) we’ve had a blast…

“Coaches coach, and this is what I need to be doing, and I’m so happy and blessed (UNC Director of Athletics) Bubba (Cunningham) offered us this job and that we took it.”

What Brown is facing at UNC with respect to the roster he inherited is laced with unknowns to him and will be for a while. The Tar Heels start spring practice Sunday afternoon in the new indoor facility and will be in shorts and helmets.

They will practice Tuesday and Thursday this coming week as well, but Thursday is when they will don the pads and the staff can really start getting a better idea of what they’re working with.

So, there wasn’t a whole lot about the actual Tar Heels and may not be for a while. But there have been some developments and plenty of other interesting things that came from the presser. Below are some of them:

*Aside from Chazz Surratt moving to linebacker, which we reported three months ago, two other players have switched positions: Redshirt freshman Avery Jones has moved from offensive line to nose tackle and redshirt freshman Devon Lawrence has moved from running back to slot.

*Quarterback Nathan Elliott has decided to drop out of grad school and accept an offer as a graduate assistant on Blake Anderson’s staff at Arkansas State and is no longer with the UNC program. Elliott released a statement on Twitter, which is posted at the bottom of this report.

Regarding Elliott, Brown said: “Nathan has done everything right in this program. He’s been a captain, he’s been a leader, he’s really fought his guts out on the field and I really like him… It’s our job to give them options, and it’s good that he had that option. We wanted him to stay but totally understand that he has got some other things.”

*Senior linebacker Jonathan Smith is out of school this spring due to academics but will return in June. He is allowed to work with Tommy Thigpen and the strength coach individually.

*Injured and out for all of spring practice are: Allen Cater, Tyrone Hopper, Jason Strowbridge and Wyatt Tunall.

*Available this spring but in non-contact status are Myles Dorn, Antoine Green and Myles Wolfolk.

Getting To Know His Team

Brown said last month on National Signing Day that he’d met with about 30 returning players, so with spring practice beginning Sunday, how many has he sat down with?

“I’ve met every player. I sat down and talked to every player, walk-on, scholarship (player), individually,” Brown said. “Some for five minutes, some for thirty. And what I was asking is - number one - to get to know them I need to know faces and names. We put all their names on the back of their t-shirts in the off-season program so you sit there and you look at them and say, ‘Hmm, he’s fast, turn around and let me see who you are.’

“But, it was really healthy for me because I could ask them, ‘Where are you from? What’s your family like? Why’d you come here? What are you studying? What do want to get when you get out? You were here when we won 11 games, what happened that we dropped off?’

"And then, just asking each one of them, ‘Tell me about the leadership last year? Tell me about what you like about the place, tell me about the concerns, what do we need to change? Why is it not working right now?’ And it was really healthy for me to go through that process with all the guys.”

So What Do They Have?

Brown and his staff will start getting a better idea of what kind of personnel they’ve inherited with the start of spring practice Sunday, but they can’t wear full pads until Thursday. Here’s what Brown had to say about that:

“On Sunday, we’ll be (practicing) in shorts. And I had an older friend, Joe Jamail, told me one time - who’s a prominent lawyer in Texas and the field’s (at The University of Texas) named after him - ‘You can’t learn to swim without water and you can’t learn to play football without pads.’

“So, we’ll watch them run around, we’ll try to teach them on Sunday and then again on Tuesday. But, we probably won’t know as much about them until we put the pads on on Thursday before we get ready to go to this Spring Break.”