Football with a purpose: Why North Carolina head coach Mack Brown keeps coming back

Why does he do it?

North Carolina’s Mack Brown will be 73 in August. He’s in the College Football Hall of Fame. He has won a national championship. He and his wife, Sally, are financially set.

But there he was Monday night, again front and center — and being heard — as the Tar Heels held their first football practice of preseason camp.

“Compete but also care for each other!” Brown said at one point over the loud speakers as the players went through drills with a good pace and energy.

Brown likens the first day of camp to opening day in baseball. There’s an excitement to it, an anticipation of what lies ahead and what might be. That’s his pitch.

He also dipped back into the past to quote the wife of former Texas coach Darrell Royal: “The rollercoaster has started, so grab hold and have fun.”

Brown is grabbing hold and doing it for the 36th time as a head coach. The Tar Heels, coming off an 8-5 finish in 2023 that had a lot of early wins and too many late losses, begin the season Aug. 29 at Minnesota in a Thursday night game.

There’s much work to be done. The Heels must decide on a starting quarterback from among Max Johnson, Conner Harrell and Jacolby Criswell, the threesome that ran several drills in that order Monday.

After the night practice, Brown said he was headed back to his office to watch the video of the first workout. He’ll later analyze the five criteria he said will be used for judging his quarterbacks, including overall knowledge of the offense, passing accuracy, picking the right receivers, sack avoidance and taking care of the ball.

The starter for Minnesota, Brown said, would be selected about a week to 10 days before the opener.

That’s a major decision. Drake Maye is gone to the NFL. The Heels need a consistently good quarterback. They also have new faces on the offensive and defensive lines and decisions to make in setting the overall two-deep.

“We’ve got more depth than we’ve had since we’ve been here,” Brown said. “Now, what we’ve got to do as coaches is let them separate themselves.”

But Brown also wants a more consistent focus on all the details. The Heels had too many penalties last season, he said, attributed in large part of a lack of discipline.

Photos: Go inside North Carolina’s first football practice of the 2024 season

It’s that need for better discipline that he said caused him to be upset Monday when he walked through a messy locker room and players lounge at the Kenan Football Center. As much as he liked the vibe of the first practice, he disliked seeing the locker room on the way to practice, and let it be known,

“I told the team, ‘You’re a player-led team. I don’t want to walk in there and clean it up,’” he said, “I told them we either clean it up as a team or we run as a team. It’s your choice.’

“And it will be clean.”

Again, why does he do it? Why worry about recruiting, NIL packages and transfers, why put in all the late-night work and absorb the game-day stress? Why be aggravated by a messy locker room?

Brown had a one-word answer: “Purpose.”

“The thing we all have is a purpose,” Brown said. “We like what we do and we get up every morning with something we’ve done our whole life. I wouldn’t know what to do next year if I didn’t have this.

“And I love these kids. … I’ve got a purpose. I love the game of football and I’ve been involved with it my whole life, for longer than 50 years because I played before I coached. And I came back and promised North Carolina I’d try to make them relevant again and we are relevant.”

Brown has done that twice. In his first 10-year run as the Heels’ head coach, he built a top-10 program before leaving for Texas, where he won a national championship. Returning to UNC in 2019 after a stint with ESPN, he has won 38 games in five seasons and gone 24-18 in ACC play, won a divisional title and played in the Orange Bowl.

There was some chatter late last season that Brown might retire. He didn’t, but also realized his age and questions about retirement were being used against him in recruiting.

At the recent ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte, Brown noted Mike Elko had said he would be the coach at Duke longer than Brown would be at Carolina. Elko left after the 2023 season to take the Texas A&M job.

“I called him after he went to A&M and said, ‘OK, you lied,’’ Brown said. “He said, ‘I didn’t think I was going (to leave).’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got that. I hear all that.’”

Brown has heard it all. And he’s still at Carolina, ready for the rollercoaster again.