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Mack Brown criticizes North Carolina for awkward timing of firing announcement
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Mack Brown isn’t thrilled about the timing of his firing.
Brown, the winningest head coach in North Carolina football history, was fired by the program earlier this week. The announcement by UNC came on the heels of Brown stating both publicly and privately that he intended to remain as UNC’s head coach beyond the 2024 season.
However, Brown told a different story while meeting with reporters after North Carolina’s 35-30 loss to NC State on Saturday night.
Brown said he was happy to step aside amicably, but wanted to wait to announce the change until after the conclusion of the regular season.
“All I wanted to do was wait until the end of the year, and they wanted me to retire on Monday, before the (NC) State game,” Brown said. “We haven’t beaten State, it was really important for these kids to play well and have a chance to win. I didn’t want to break their hearts on Monday. So I said, ‘No, I won’t do that.’ And then they wanted me to do it on Friday.
“Well I sure wasn’t going to do it Friday before the game. You’re 24 hours from a game and you’re disrupting their entire lives? And coaches. There’s 71 people in this building that have a different situation than they had last week. So the thing I said was I’ll talk to you [Saturday night] after the game about it. Or I’ll talk to you Sunday morning. And I don’t know what the difference in Monday and Saturday night would have been.”
Brown also said that North Carolina’s administration began its coaching search informally after its embarrassing loss to James Madison back in September.
“Really, it doesn’t matter,” Brown said. “After James Madison, we played awful. And they started looking for coaches and they should have. I felt like we probably couldn’t overcome that. But my job is to take care of those kids. That’s my job. Those seniors don’t have another year.”
Brown told reporters on Saturday night that he will not coach the Tar Heels in UNC’s bowl game.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
