UNC Football: It’s time for the Mack Brown marriage to end…

Back in 2018, as the second straight horrid season under Larry Fedora started circling the drain, I made an upset post joking that the football team is going to kill me. I had just found out I had cancer and was going to be getting chemo treatments every other weekend, including having to take a small pump home that would slowly drip the drugs into my system over the course of 30 hours. I figured at some point I would get so frustrated during a chemo weekend that I would take the device and throw it up against a wall. This was after the 47-10 disaster in Miami, and while I never had to actually sit and explain why I created a biohazard in my Boston apartment, it was clear that early in the season that it was time for a change at the top of Carolina Football.

It’s also a way of saying that things have been worse.

Still, that loss followed the one bright spot in the season—a win over Pitt after an embarrassing 0-2 start against Cal and ECU. For a gleaming moment, we as a fan base had hope. Then the team once again showed its true colors and, while Fedora was allowed to finish out the rest of the season, we all knew what that loss meant.

We’ve hit that point with this iteration of the Tar Heels. Mack hit the desperation button after last week’s embarrassing loss to James Madison, and for a while it looked like it had worked. There was a brief glimmer of hope that last weekend’s defense was just an aberration and not the norm. It held on through part of the second half as the Tar Heels extended their lead to 20-0, and then it all fell apart.

That’s the problem with this version of Mack Brown though—the “it all fell apart.” 2021 started with great promise as a third year NFL-caliber quarterback led the team and they fell apart at the start on the road. It all fell apart in 2022 as the Tar Heels had a dark horse Heisman candidate and then they couldn’t hold a lead against Georgia Tech. It all fell apart in 2023 when the Tar Heels had an inspiring win with a huge home crowd versus Miami, only to have them choke and only win one more game of consequence the rest of the season. It all fell apart last weekend when a rebuilding team managed to surprise the Tar Heels and at no point did it look like they could answer. It also all fell apart on Saturday when the Tar Heels were called for a questionable holding penalty, settling for 20-0 instead of 24-0 and never recovered.

Carolina has now been through three defensive coordinators and two offensive coordinators. NFL front office folks have disparaged both OC’s in the breakdown of their two pro quarterbacks, and despite three different defensive schemes the players show the same lack of discipline, the same lack of fundamentals, and the same propensity to give up big plays at the worst time. When you’ve changed out coordinators that much and the same problems keep cropping up it’s not their fault, it’s yours.

I tried to share a shred of optimism last Tuesday speaking with Adam Gold, noting that Mack Brown seemed to have a special gear with Manny Diaz and that, if the team showed that they were willing to learn from last weekend, then the schedule still looked favorable enough for a good season. In truth, you can hear at the end of the conversation how doubtful I was that it would happen. I didn’t expect it to happen in perhaps one of the most painful ways possible.

It’s time for this charade to end. The cracks in the program were on full display last weekend, right up to the point that some people felt the need to tell Inside Carolina what was said. Brown bemoaning the fact that the locker room is no longer sacred is a sign—it should be, and players that are happy with the direction of the team would have kept that behind closed doors. Even in the worst of the Carolina basketball seasons, the dysfunctions didn’t come out until after the year was over. Mack shut down any chance for players to speak to the media, saying they needed to “focus on Duke,” and it turned into an embarrassing loss. Wait, I’m sorry, another embarrassing loss.