Mack Brown admits he 'got tired at Texas' prior to resignation from Longhorns

Now that he’s taken a step back from coaching once again and is in more of an analyst role, joining various podcasts and shows, former North Carolina coach Mack Brown has had some time to reflect. He’s gone deep into the vault to reveal some interesting tidbits about his coaching career.

One of them? That he was experiencing a little burnout before he left Texas.

After he was done with the Longhorns, he enjoyed some time working on television. He got comfortable with his new role.

“I was with you, with TV, and I really liked it,” Brown told former ESPN analyst David Pollack on the See Ball Get Ball podcast. “I enjoyed having a team again. I loved, I was probably crazy, I would go Friday night and do a game or Thursday night, and then get up at 4 in the morning, fly to Bristol, do ABC Countdown to Kickoff all day, then do SportsCenter on Sunday morning before we’d come home. But I loved that.

“I loved the game. I loved the coaches. I loved the kids that played the game. And that’s really, really important to me, and it’s what I want to continue to do, stay involved.”

Once again removed from the coaching ranks, Mack Brown is settling into his new role again. It’s not something he’s unfamiliar with.

He did explain, though, that he had some burnout prior to his exit at Texas. Noting:

“We got tired at Texas. Sixteen years is a long time at a place like Texas,” Brown said. “Sally always said it’s four presidential terms. So that’s a long time to be at the University of Texas, so it was probably time for me to leave there and for them to get somebody else new, because you get worn down.”

However, the entire experience was something that provided some life lessons. For one, Mack Brown realized he wasn’t ready to hang up the whistle for good.

“What I learned was I was tired, I wasn’t really ready to be through with coaching,” he said. “So a lot of people would call and ask if you would coach in this place or this place. Sally and I thought we’ll only go to a place where we would want to live and we would only go back to a place where we thought we could win within the rules. And North Carolina, we got married there, our kids grew up there. They went to school at North Carolina, some of them. So it was a natural when they called us and asked us to come back.”

North Carolina also represented a challenge for Mack Brown and his family. They could try to revitalize the program, get it back to the levels they knew it was capable of.

“I like fixing things, and the program was in a mess,” Brown said. “They’d won three games two years before. They’d won two games the year before. Nobody was coming to the games. It was really sad to sit there at ESPN and even watch. And I really liked Larry Fedora, but it wasn’t working at the end. So we come back in, and what you really get into coaching for, and you coach, you’ve coached your kids and kids for your whole life, you get into coaching because you can change lives. And that’s what’s so important. And people forget that.”

So Brown jumped back into coaching and had a nice little run of it with the Tar Heels. Now, he’s taking another step back. He knows he wants to be around the game still, but in what capacity remains to be seen. In any case, college football fans will keep one eye out for Mack Brown.