Mack Brown highlights importance of building culture, environment within program

Mack Brown is officially six months into his second retirement from college coaching after his late November firing formally closed the door on his second career stint at North Carolina. It certainly wasn’t the end the 73-year-old Brown envisioned for himself when he returned to Chapel Hill in 2019.

But just as his replacement, six-time Super Bowl champion coach Bill Belichick, already has the Tar Heels embroiled in an off-the-field controversy involving his 24-year-old girlfriend, Brown recently opened up about what goes into implementing a winning culture and environment after taking over a program.

During a recent appearance the More Than The Scoreboard podcast series with former USC and Iowa player and ex-high school coach Corbin Smith, Brown laid out the three main factors he looks for when rebuilding a program. Those included the specific attributes he looks for in an incoming coaching staff, how he wants those coaches to approach creating a rapport with players, and then establishing the program’s seminal “common purpose.”

“When we would come in (to a new program), we always started out … I learned when I sat out for my five years that I didn’t want to hire any staff member or coach that I didn’t like, that I didn’t respect, that I didn’t admire, because you’re around them all day,” Brown explained. “The other thing I wanted … I wanted them to want to be there. Paul Dietzel said, ‘Don’t ever keep anybody on your staff that doesn’t want to be there.’ … You can find you somebody that wants to be there. … And I wanted to be around happy people. If you’re around miserable people, then you’re miserable, and the kids are miserable. So I wanted to have a really good environment with people that loved the place and that were happy.”

Once his staff was in place, Brown focused on communication and implementing a prevailing message that would permeate through the entire program.

“When we’d walk into a program, for the young coaches out there, we wanted to learn to communicate. Usually when you come in, there’s not a trusting team, it’s a team that’s down, they’ve been losing, and you’re just another face. … You’ve got to communicate well enough to get them to talk to you so you can build up trust and respect,” Brown explained. “And if you don’t have trust and respect, you’ve got nothing. … You’ve got ask them what’s wrong. You’ve got to ask them how to fix it. And then you’ve got to ask them what they need and want, and if you feel like it’s what’s best for the program, you’ve got to do it to get credibility with them and build up some trust.”

Mack Brown then recalled a special lesson about uniting around a common purpose that he learned from a United States general years ago during a trip to occupied Iraq.

“When we came home I said, ‘OK, we want every kid to graduate. That’s our common purpose. We want to win every game. That’s our common purpose. … Then we also want these young people to be better prepared for life after football,” Brown concluded. “And that’s not happening as much now with the transferring. … But if a recruit or a parent asked, every kid, every staff member, every coach would say exactly the same thing.”

Of course, while Brown’s approach to program building certainly helped him win 288 games over his 36-year head coaching career, including the 2005 BCS National Championship in the midst of a 16-year (1998-2013) run at Texas, it didn’t have the same impact during his final six-year run in Chapel Hill. Brown went 113-79-1 over 16 combined years at North Carolina, but only won nine games in a season once (2022) before finishing a disappointing 6-6 in 2024.