Mack Brown slid so easily back into his old job, like shrugging on a rumpled old sweatshirt on a cool fall morning, that it’s easy to forget now, almost four years later, what a tremendous gamble this really was. It’s not that it had never been tried before, but there was an inherent audacity in bringing a coach off a television set and out of retirement back to a school that, all these years later, still never quite got over him leaving the first time.
And if he’d walked off into the sunset at Texas, that might have been one thing. But there was also the way things ended there, as the program seemed to slip from his grasp in the years after he delivered the Longhorns’ long-sought national title.
Still, the way Brown assumed his old position as if he’d never left has been remarkable, a man truly back where he belongs, and his tenure has certainly offered hints of the old magic along the way. There’s so much to like about what Brown has done back in Chapel Hill. At some point, though, there has to be more.
Entering the fourth season of the second Mack Brown era at North Carolina, it’s still too soon to say whether this grand experiment has actually worked. Promising early returns and unquestioned progress devolved into a mixed-up mess last season, leaving any conclusions hanging very much in the balance.
This season may tip that balance, because for everything else Brown has accomplished back at UNC, he still has yet to match the on-field accomplishments of his erratic predecessor, who despite everything else — and there was an awful lot — fought through the NCAA sanctions he inherited, came within a play or two of an ACC title and left a respectable roster behind for Brown.
Last year was supposed to be the turning point, with a Heisman-caliber quarterback and a tailwind of confidence from the progress shown during the weird COVID season in 2020, when the Tar Heels made the Orange Bowl but contributed to the ACC’s 0-6 bowl record. This year, even with Sam Howell off to the NFL, really needs to be. There’s plenty of returning talent at other positions along with the return of another former coach — defensive coordinator Gene Chizik — with a proven record of instant improvement.
That breakthrough season is the one piece missing from Brown’s return. (That and a win over his alma mater, Florida State.) It just happens to be the most important.
Larry Fedora had the same record through his first three seasons as Mack II does, but they have very little else in common. Brown has restored the image and prestige of UNC football, cleaned up on the recruiting trail and even his most awkward moment — claiming that media hype was somehow responsible for the last disappointing season — pales in comparison to any of Fedora’s greatest hits, from his ring-ordering (for a championship UNC didn’t win) to his check-writing (for the damage his players did celebrating at Duke) to his concussion-truthing (the ACC media day “football under attack” debacle) to his fight-denying (the scuffle after his final loss to N.C. State was just “their team celebrating and our team celebrating.”)
There’s no question there’s a more professional aura about the program, more ambition and less chicanery, and there was considerable momentum building until last season came crashing down. The intangibles have changed for the better, from fan interest — always, always a battle with basketball in Chapel Hill — to national attention.
Still, at some point, all of this hype and all of these highly rated recruiting classes have to deliver some tangibles — and it won’t get any easier next season when the Coastal Division training wheels come off. In some ways, Brown couldn’t lose, because his mere presence called back to a time when everything seemed right about North Carolina football. But he needs to win, too.
There are still too many unresolved uncertainties to call Brown’s unlikely return a success or a failure, but the pendulum is going to swing one way or another this season. Either the Tar Heels resume their upward trajectory this fall, writing last season off as an unfortunate aberration and putting a bow on Brown’s triumphant return, or they don’t. In the latter case there will suddenly be bigger questions to answer.
Maybe you can go home again. Maybe you can’t. The telling of that tale isn’t long off.
