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Pete Fiutak

North Carolina Tar Heels Preview 2022: Season Prediction, Breakdown, Key Games, Players

North Carolina Tar Heels Preview 2022: Previewing, predicting, and looking ahead to the North Carolina season with what you need to know and keys to the season.


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North Carolina Tar Heels Preview
Mack Brown: 90-63-1, 14th year at North Carolina
34th year overall (265-139-1), 2021 Preview
2021 Record: Overall: 6-7, Conference: 3-5
Offense, Defense Breakdown | Keys To The Season
Season Prediction, What Will Happen
North Carolina Top 10 Players
North Carolina Schedule & Analysis

North Carolina Tar Heels Preview 2022

Oh sure, the recruiting has been great, and the games have been wild fun, but 21-17 in three seasons isn’t exactly how this was all supposed to go considering the hype going into last season, but …

It’s been lost in a big hurry that North Carolina was 5-20 in a 25 game run before the guy took over.

He’s Mack Brown.

He’s in the College Football Hall of Fame with 265 total wins and a national championship at Texas as part of a phenomenal stretch of nine straight seasons with ten or more wins in the 2000s. But there was always the knock that his teams had all the talent in the world and couldn’t quite come through outside of that one magical 2005 season.

Since taking over the North Carolina in 2019 after leaving Texas in 2013, he has put together teams as talented as any in the ACC outside of Clemson, and …

21-17. Again, the Tar Heels went 2-9 the season before Brown stepped in, but the bar was set a bit higher after what he was able to do to turn things around.

It’s been 13 years since Colt McCoy got knocked out of the BCS Championship game loss to Alabama.

Throw that 13-1 Texas team’s defeat into the mix, and Brown is now 51-39 in his last seven seasons as a head coach. That’s hardly awful, but for a guy who went 14 straight years in Austin with only one season with more than three losses, going seven campaigns in a row with four or more defeats doesn’t exactly scream trend up.

To make matters even more interesting, his defense is coming off an abysmal year and his offense is undergoing a personnel overhaul just when this is all supposed to be hitting its stride. But there’s one giant positive coming from the dud of a 2021 – there aren’t any major expectations in 2022.

Last year’s team was overhyped, and it fizzled with the tone set from the start in a sad trombone 17-10 clunker to Virginia Tech, and with double-digit losses to bad Florida State and Georgia Tech teams,

And then, with a chance to end on a high note to crank up a little momentum going into this year, out came another bad performance in a loss to South Carolina. All that did was hand Brown just his second losing season since 1989.

But his team still has a ton of talent, he changed some things up with his coaching staff – bringing aboard Gene Chizik as the Assistant Head Coach for Defense was an interesting move – the schedule couldn’t possibly be more favorable, and …

He’s still Mack Brown, and that means this team with no Clemson on the slate should set the bar at ACC Championship appearance or bust.

Offense, Defense Breakdown | Keys To The Season
Season Prediction, What Will Happen
North Carolina Top 10 Players
North Carolina Schedule & Analysis

North Carolina Tar Heels Preview 2022: Offense, Defense NEXT

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