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Mack Brown, the winningest coach in North Carolina football program history, will not be returning next season, and following the Tar Heels' 35-30 loss to rival NC State, Brown spoke about his departure.
After 16 seasons across two different stints, Brown, 73, coached his final game at North Carolina and likely in college football altogether on Saturday. Unsurprisingly, Brown is not quite satisfied with the current state of the sport of which he has been a part since 1969.
“Now, the money's different,” Brown said during his postgame press conference [h/t Inside Carolina]. “We lost three or four recruits at the end of this year, just in the last two or three weeks, because they got paid. And we asked them, and they said, ‘I got paid.' So, I mean, I got it. And that's the other reason that I think it's a great time for me to get out. This isn't the game that I signed up for. It has changed so much since I've been here in six years. We went through COVID, which was very difficult for all of us.”
Mack Brown's time as North Carolina football coach comes to an end
Brown said that he agreed with the North Carolina administration that there needed to be a change at the head coaching position, although he said he wanted the move to be made at the end of the season. Instead, North Carolina announced Tuesday that Brown would not return for his seventh consecutive and 17th overall season as the Tar Heels' head coach.
Across his two stints (1988 to 1997 and 2019 to 2024), Brown went 107-73-1 at North Carolina. While his return to Chapel Hill left a lot to be desired — the Tar Heels failed to win more than nine games and lost all but one bowl game during this tenure — Brown is undoubtedly one of the greatest coaches in North Carolina football history.
Brown has coached, won, and lost more games than any other person in program history, and in his first stint, he rebounded from a poor start — he won just two of his first 22 games — and built UNC into a perennial 10-win program.
Unfortunately for the legend, his second run in Chapel Hill finished much like his time in Texas: awkwardly. Brown, who won a national championship in 2006 with the Longhorns, had seemingly planned to retire and leave the program in the hands of defensive coordinator and head coach-in-waiting Will Muschamp.
However, with Brown seemingly pushing off retirement, Muschamp left Texas in 2010 to become Florida's head coach. Three years later, following four straight single-digit-win seasons, Brown finally announced his resignation at the end of the 2013 season. He was succeeded by Charlie Strong, who failed to win more than six games in a single season in Austin.
After several years working on television, Brown returned to coaching and Chapel Hill to replace Larry Fedora. While Brown stabilized a program that won five combined games over the two seasons preceding his return, he could not lead the Tar Heels back to double-digit wins and transform UNC into a consistent ACC title contender.
Across his nearly 40-year college football head coaching career, which spanned five decades and four schools (Appalachian State, Tulane, Texas, and North Carolina), Brown compiled a 288-155-1 record.
