Mack Brown comments on concerns about North Carolina's culture

Mack Brown knows the way his North Carolina teams have finished seasons has not been satisfactory. But he’s also not going to spend the offseason finger pointing, either.

And he’s not worried about issues with culture, and dismissed any chatter from the outside that things aren’t going well in the football building. The staff is re-examining how they do things on a granular level, Brown said, but are not trying to overhaul the ethos of their program.

“I think they aren’t involved in our program, they don’t see it day to day and they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m locked in. I’m looking for every little thing, too. I just don’t make up words. I gotta find facts. And that’s what I’m doing. Every. Little. Thing,” Brown said.

Culture might not be an issue, as far as Brown is concerned, but with some new staff members coming in he quickly learned there were some blindspots in their approach.

He credited new defensive coordinator Geoff Collins with a keen observation.

“We’re looking at our offseason program. We’re looking at everything in nutrition. I think another thing that really hit all of us with Geoff was talking about, we gotta play more players. I think we wear out at the end of the year. You can’t play two linebackers. As good as Ced Gray and Power [Echols] are, they played 900 plays, they’re worn out. And we’ve played a tougher end of the schedule than we had beginning of the schedule. So, part of it’s who you play, but I do think we need to play — we didn’t play many corners, but we had people hurt, we had people out. Two years ago, we had all the defensive linemen hurt, so that was tougher. But we are going to be simpler on defense and we’re going to play a lot of players,” Brown said. “Those were two things that just jumped out at us with Geoff that we talk about every day in staff meetings, we haven’t done a very good job of. But when he started talking, I said ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. I like all of that.'”

Further, Brown said, the Tar Heels will be revamping some of the strength and conditioning work in the offseason under strength coach Brian Hess.

“But Brian Hess does a great job. He’s got a tremendous staff. Those guys work really, really hard. We’re going to go back and do more of the county fair grass drills that we were doing the first two years that we were here that we got away from some in Covid, because they left. So we’re going to go back and change up our offseason program some. We’re going to move spring practice back another week so we have more time for the offseason program. But we are looking at every little thing and we’re grading every little thing to make sure whatever it is that we’re missing at the end of the year, we’re going to take care of it and make sure we don’t do it again,” Brown said.