There was a lot of eye-rolling in the college football world the day North Carolina re-hired Mack Brown. Sure, he had an unprecedented run of success in Chapel Hill in the ‘90s and won a national championship at Texas, but he also stumbled through his final years in Austin and has spent the past five years in an announcers booth.
Rather than find a young innovator, North Carolina turned to a known—and, the argument goes, stale—commodity. SB Nation’s Bill Connelly sums it up this way:
Thirty years ago, UNC hired a charismatic 36-year-old named Mack Brown.