He wasn't at the top of my list either, but he's here now so everything else is moot. I wish him great success. Now I've said all I'm going to say on the subject of Woad, believe what you will.
Mack 2.0 - so far, a really bad dream
- Thread starter WoadBlue
- Start date
BUTCH DAVIS was the best hire since Mack Brown 1.0? Where did THAT get us? He cared nothing for UNC except as a paycheck, had no values or ethics other than winning, and was about the worst fit possible. We're still paying for that mistake. I think its possible to be a UNC fan but fundamentally misunderstand the university.
You know everyone keeps referring to his last few seasons at tx as some sort of horror story. He was 25-14. The only two schools in the nation that would fire someone with those numbers are tx and ala. He goes 25-14 next 3 yrs here and we name the freaking stadium after him.
To echo some of the sentiments above. Some of you are turning your nose up like we are a perennial football power and have been good in football for so long. Please check yourselves because even in Mack’s worst years, we’d have won 5 more games per season than we won the last 2 years under Fedora.
I would be very happy. The same as with Bunting. I was almost 100% certain that Bunting would be a disaster by the end of his 2nd season (3 wins). I was 100% certain the Bunting hire was a disaster worse than the Torbush hire before the end of his 3rd season, and I said so, and said why. But I would have loved to have been wrong and Bunting put up back to back to back 9 win seasons. If I had been wrong and Bunting had won at that rate, with the over the hill rates of Bowden and Beamer and Miami handcuffing itself with Randy Shanon and GT limited by the offense and Clemson not revived, UNC could have become the dominant program in the ACC.
That is how much a single coaching hire can mean, often does mean. If you make the right hire, you can move way up the ladder of the football hierarchy rather quickly, while another wrong hire can keep stagnated or, worse, drop you farther down that hierarchy.
Whatever their reasons for so being, people who intend to be pollyanna about Mack 2.0 will not see, or if they see will not acknowledge, potential serious negatives until forced to do so.
When people began talking about the possibility of rehiring Mack, should Fedora get fired, they always couched it as a good idea because Mack would be a CEO/caretaker HC for 3 to 5, maybe 6 years, a transition coach getting the program on stable legs. Virtually such proponents of Mack 2.0 asserted that it would feature a Head Coach in Waiting as the OC or DC, or perhaps Associate HC and Head Coach in Waiting.
For that to work, Mack must be amenable to the plan. Mack has had a Head Coach in Waiting at Texas: Will Muschamp. The offer was made by AD Dodds to keep Muschamp from interviewing for other jobs, HC jobs. There is no evidence that Mack liked it a bit. Most Big 12 people commenting on it wondered how long it would be before Muschamp left. Muschamp was indispensable to Texas finishing 12-1 and #3 in 2008 and then 13-1, National Championship Game loser to Bama, in 2009.
For Texas, the bottom fell out in 2010: 5-7. Mack subsequently has talked about his inability to get over the Championship loss to Bama. But that year marked something that the injury to Colt McCoy in the Championship Game more than hinted at: problems with player development, especially at QB. Large numbers of Texas fans began asking when Coach February (so called for always having a Top 5, at least Top 10, recruiting class but winning only 2 Big 12 championships in 13 seasons) might begin to win up to the talent level on the team.
Nice guy Mack was not so pleasant. Muschamp was not his protegee: DeLoss Dodds really wanted to keep Muschamp and DC and eventual HC. And that led to major friction on the staff. Mack had noted repeatedly in interviews that he was still young and not ready to retire.
My impression then was that Mack is not the kind of guy to do Head Coach in Waiting, because that would mean he was being envisioned as being set out to pasture.
Mack got his wish: Muschamp took the FL HC job. To prove that he still had it, Mack set out to hire a pair of new coordinators, each of which would be young and red hot in the profession. Mack succeeded in hiring Bryan Harsin as OC and Manny Diaz as DC. But Mack made one of his favorite former Longhorn players, Major Applewhite, Harsin's co-OC. The 2-headed OC never meshed well, and Harsin left for the first HC job offered: Arkansas St.
Before 2013 started, the Texas voices openly asking how many Top 10 recruiting classes in a row it took Mack to win at least 2 conference championships every 10 years had become very loud. They were tired of Coach February watching Bob Stoops win Big 12 championship after Big 12 championship. Mack knew the pressure, and when BYU ran all over his team (I think the QB had 250 yards and the team 500+ yards rushing), in game 2, Mack fired Diaz and named Greg Robinson the DC.
Mack turned to an old friend, whose competence was easily questionable. Mack was comfortable with Applewhite and Robinson, and he was not comfortable with Harsin and Diaz.
Harsin was always a better OC than Applewhite and is now a better HC than Applewhite, and Diaz is once again widely recognized as a 1st rate DC, while the very idea of Mack rehiring Greg Robinson as DC was such a national joke that Mack was compelled to call a Mulligan.
There is nothing in the Mack Brown story that tells me: 1) he can win consistently up to the level of talent on the team; 2) he will give more than lip service to the concept of Coach in Waiting; 3) he is willing to be a CEO delegating rather than a micromanager; 4) he is truly comfortable with coaches coming from outside his orbit having meaningful authority; 5) he is any more aware of the limitations of age than were Bowden and Beamer.
If Mack had hired Chizik and Kingsbury, or roughly comparable coordinators, and allowed them to have say in the position coaches under them, I would be praising the hire.
i agree with that. woad is a good tar heel fan. he just has a nack for stirring up controversy, which is fine.
again, it comes down to expectations. there's some on here that act like we are a first rate, perennial power in football and have the ability to hand pick first rate coordinators and position coaches across the board. hell some on here tossed around the idea that Satterfield would come here even after the Mack hire as the OC/coach in waiting from App State, despite the fact that he will likely get major P5 offers rolling in over the next 30-45 days which would put him well above Mack's pay grade. how delusional are some of you guys? right now, we are a bottom third job amongst P5 schools. I'll save us all the trouble of listing all the reasons why but we all know them. Truth is, I was hoping we'd hire a younger, proven coach. That was my first option. But I do also understand that Mack is the very best from a resume perspective that we could have gotten and at the end of the day, I'm OK with the hire. It absolutely could have been worse.
Mack will be a serviceable coach for you guys until you can hire a long term replacement. I expect to see an uptick in UNC’s recruiting. If he can get you to at least 4-4 in ACC play, you’ll probably be in contention for the Coastal Division most years. The biggest challenge for Mack will be working without the system that was in place at UNC during his last stint that facilitated the recruitment and graduation of functionally illiterate athletes.
Its sad that y’all fellas have just been able to get by UNC The last 2 years as storong as that football program is...I mean you have been right there with Clemson...I feel pretty good that we have been able to make it a game the last 2 years with a Top 10 program that Doren has built...
Hopefully Mack will take a page out of moo's playbook and play a bunch of glorified high schools so we can pad our win total.
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Our original non-conference schedule this year was comparable to yours: One FCS team, two FBS teams, and a Power Five FBS team. The West Virginia game was cancelled because of the hurricane. I was not in favor of adding the ECU game at the end of the season. They were horrible this year, and lost to FCS North Carolina A&T. However, they somehow managed to find two teams they could beat this year.
Not to mention starting players taking certificate programs and claiming eligibility. Those programs are meant to be continuing ed for working adults (if we want to admit that all college football players are working adults, that's a different story), not a handy way to squeeze out an extra year of eligibility. They are not graduate programs.At least we won't have players listed as Juniors and majoring in First Year College as the mutts did while claiming to be the Harvard of Wake County.
Typical mouth breathing $tate fan. How is it that the SAT scores of those “functionally illiterate” kids were higher than the MooU players? I guess Mack had other people take their tests and I’m damn sure that Swofford was in on it too.
You just make sure that the Adidas money keeps flowing through so that you can try to keep up with recruiting. It always makes me laugh when a $tate fan makes a jab at us about cheating when the only success that you’ve ever had in anything significant was centered around cheating to get there! And we are talking about cheating confirmed by the NCAA, not a message board.
Fortunately Roy Cooper does not have the same influence over the current BOG the same way Governor for life Hunt did when he was elected for his third term
It was Hunt who orchestrated the rise of AFAM to departmental status in an effort to defuse a potential political problem (see the supreme court case re: Michigan) in his attempt at national political office.
Meanwhile the same courses of study are still available at State College that allowed the development of exceptional amphibious basketball players.
Me? No.
It would a bit f we had no QB on campus worth much. But both Fortin and Ruder have big potential. And having 3 such potentially excellent QBs in back to back classes, all of whom will be freshmen in eligibility next fall, only guarantees that at least 1 will transfer almost certainly within a year, and that probably two of them are gone after no more than 3 years on campus.
Then there is the matter of overrating the value of the QB position. If your DL, LBs, DBs, OL, TEs, WRs, and RBs are all low average while your QB is a perfect combination of Peyton Manning with Vince Young's running skills, then only a weak schedule will get you into a low bowl. Games are won in the trenches, and require sound play elsewhere than just QB.
Moo has 3 4* DL recruits from NC in this coming class each of which we need more than we need Howell.
Now, if we had neither Fortin nor Ruder, that would not be the case. Then we would have great need of a young QB with excellent potential.
But that all is somewhat beside the point, which has several component parts: That Mack's Texas history indicates, strongly, that he is uncomfortable with turning over any real control, that he wants coordinators he sees as already in his camp, so to speak, which means he sees them as little more Yes Men.
The Greg Robinson fiasco was not an accident. Mack, if it hadn't become a national joke, would have made his old buddy DC, and then he would have named an OC who also made him feel comfortable that the program is HIS.
In that, Mack is very much like Fedora. Fedora was never going to give up Kap as OC.
What I had hoped to see in Mack's first moves was awareness that he needed to change, to grow out of the Mack who floundered around most of his last 4 years at Texas. But his first moves were a huge blinking neon proclaiming that he intended to prove he was right back then.
And that will not be good for UNC football. It can't make us any worse than 3 wins followed by 2 wins, but it will not get us to the top of the Coastal for more than a fluke season, much less get us largely eye to eye with Clemson.
It took Mack the first time at UNC nearly a decade to get everything really humming. He will be 68 next season. In all of CFB history, how many Hall of Fame coaches were even close to being as good in their 70s as they were in their 40s and 50s and early 60s?
Bill Snyder was, before he hit 75, but he is in many ways the opposite of Mack: Snyder has never been a 'Coach February.' Snyder has never been about signing Top 10 classes or even Top 20 classes. Snyder is all about developing players by demanding fundamentals, all about Xs and Os.
Mack is all about recruiting, and the older a coach gets, the easier it is to recruit against him by saying he may be too old be there when you graduate, and even if he is, he may be too old to get done what he did even 5 years ago. Mack's Texas history says he will confront that by wanting contract extension to prove to recruits he will be around, and then to brush off the hot, innovative coordinators he feels have been forced on him so he can make his BFFs and former players coordinators.
Coaches who are too old for the job always do serious damage to the program.
You have to admire Woad’s consistency
Yes, Moo has the same problem. It is everywhere, and not just in black studies. Anytime you have group identity politics turned into academic classes, you have corruption, because that is the nature of politics. Classes become pure grade inflation because they are about group cheerleading, and grade inflation always draws students who want the most something for the least nothing.
UNC's AFAM, as you note, was a pure political arrangement, which should help explain to people why A&S never looked at the department, making sure it was doing things the right way, the way A&S looked in on Biology, Chemistry, English, History, etc. And once Julius and Debi realized nobody dared look closely at them, that they were protected from scrutiny by politics, they went hog wild.
years alone do not make a man old. a young man can be burdened with impediments stereotypically associated with older men -- fatigue, stubbornness, distractability, poor judgement, etc (e.g. larry fedora), while an older man can be energetic, intense, focused, and incisive (e.g. nick saban) our opponents will try to use mack's age against us, sure, but that can easily backfire when mack impresses recruits and their parents with his drive and wit and expertise and all the strengths that have made him a superlative recruiter. also, the coordinators and position coaches who enjoy a direct relationship with the kid can have great longevity in a successful program (e.g. bud foster). i hope you will set aside your ageism and enjoy the opportunity this great coach is presenting to our very sick program.
100% Agree with all of this. Age is just a number. I also think Mack is motivated to prove his doubters wrong.
We have made a huge mistake by not hiring Satterfield when we could.
Mack will do OK, but will never get us to where we want to be.
Satterfield definitely has potential, but he is far from a sure thing, especially considering he has no experience as a HC at a power 5 program. I remember when guys like Jim McElwain and Turner Gill were the next "can't miss" coaching prospects.
There is a big-time Power Five program that recently hired a 33 year old head coach with zero years of head coaching experience at any level. His record is 24-3, and his team is in the college football playoffs this year.
True. But Riley coached at multiple P5 schools and was groomed under Stoops. Satterfield has never coached at the level in any role. It's a major leap.
from a casual fan perspective please put something for me to watch on Saturday's that is more competent than what i have seen the last couple of years. Always find myself watching them play and i can't get back those 3 hours every weekend to do something enjoyable. Mack will change that at least, and a dream scenario is the last time i had season tickets which was around 1997. For the younger generation, you can't imagine how talented our football team was that year. Where you want this program to be is where they were that year no question. If he can recruit like that again they will be quite enjoyable to watch again.
If Satterfield ended up here and had 2 or 3 good years in a row, there's a good chance he would be gone for a different program..similar to Mack Brown back in the day! He's young and all kinds of big programs would come calling for him if he did very well here! Hell im pretty sure bigger programs wanted Fedora after the year that we made the acc championship! Unfortunately stuff like that is what we will always have to deal with here!
So, we don't want to be too successful because the coach may get a better job?
I'm not saying that..I just think that is what would happen with Satterfield if he came here and was successful! Just the reality of it! Unless he just truly loved the UNC job and/or we paid him an assload! Guess you never know, I honestly like the Mack brown hire and would have liked Satterfield as well! You can't go into the situation thinking "let's not get a young coach who might end up winning here bc he will leave" I just think there's a good possibility that it would happen! At least now Mack Brown won't leave for another school and he will probably retire for good from UNC! And that could be 4 years or 8 years..only time will tell!
Mack was motivated to try to keep Bob Stoops from winning 5 Big 12 championships to Mack's 1. But that did not alter reality.
There are all kinds of things I am motivated to do that I could not accomplish now that I could have accomplished 20 or 15 or even 10 years ago.
Satterfield grew up in Hillsborough. He has spent all but 2 years of his life living in NC.
What in that persuades you that he would be ready to leave UNC with success?
If he had great success here, and a big time program offered him a job I think there is a good possibility he would take it! I mean who wouldn't at least deeply consider it, unless you were just die hard UNC! The thing is, there's quite a few programs that are considered better than UNC (football that is)
Once again I do like the Mack Brown hire and would have loved to have Satterfield as well! You're taking a risk either way. Hopefully going with Mack works out for us!
Actually, Bob Stoops won nine of his ten Big 12 Championships While Mack was at Texas. That, along with being dominated by OU in head-to-head matchups is what infuriated the UT boosters the most, especially since UT had more money, superior facilities, and better recruiting classes. Some of Mack’s losses to OU were absolute beat downs (63-14, 65-13, 55-17, 63-21).
National titles are really the only thing that matters and Mack is tied 1-1 with Stoops. And Mack beat the best team money can buy at U$C
Mack won at least eight games while he was at Texas with the exception of one year. If he can do that here, while repairing relationships then I will consider this a success. I don't expect him to make us a top 10 team again and no one should. He's here to try to right the ship for the next guy.
Does that hold for any coach? If somebody else came in and won 8 games per year and "repaired relationships" you'd be satisfied?
I think a number of people could do that, depending on what is meant by relationship repair. I think that unless you are certain Mack Brown can win the Coastal, that he has the best shot of everybody who would have had any interest in the job to win the ACC, that you do not hire him.
I am certain that nothing has changed with the powers that be behind UNC football. If Mack is 6-6, then 7-5 and 7-5, they will be happy as pie with a septaugenarian HC they like personally, who makes it easy for them by not having awful losing teams and by not winning BIG.
I don't know if I would use the word satisfied, but I would certainly be happier than I've been for most of the last two decades.
Pitt won the coastal at 7-5 this year. Mack's track record would indicate that he could at least have us in contention. I don't know who else was interested that would have been better or that could even match that. The chances that Satterfield would have done it is extremely low given his resume.
Bubba and the PTB want the football program to succeed. The amount of money they have poured into the program and the hiring of Davis and black santa shows that. They were even willing to go get Chizik to help Fed out. I realize that your whole life is based around the need for UNC football to be nothing more than average, but you've got to at least give things a chance. Stop being such a miserable person and sucking all of the air out of the room.
