Mack Brown has been shived by the North Carolina Tar Heels.
He is going to coach the final game of the season, and might coach a bowl game (reply hazy, ask again later) but he won’t be back next year.
ESPN.
The team is 6-5 this season.
Brown has coached 192 games at UNC over 16 seasons. He has won more games (113) than any coach in school history, and during first tenure at the school, which ran from 1988 through 1997, UNC became a top-10 program. During his second tenure with the school, though, his teams have been defined by late-season collapses and porous defenses. The highs were an Orange Bowl appearance at the end of the pandemic-altered 2020 season and a Coastal Division championship, followed by a loss against Clemson in the ACC title game, in 2022.
But the lows were many. A preseason top-10 ranking gave way to a 6-7 finish in 2021. In 2022 and ‘23, the Tar Heels started strong and entered the top 15 of the national rankings, only to endure agonizing late-season losing streaks that called into question their ability to finish. Throughout it all, UNC recruited well but the success there didn’t often translate to the field. Defensively, UNC has been among the worst teams in the ACC throughout Brown’s second head coaching tenure — a stunning contrast to its performance on that side of the ball during his first stint at head coach. On offense, the Tar Heels have had two of the best quarterbacks in school history in recent years in Sam Howell and Drake Maye, but sustained success proved elusive.
In two stints at North Carolina, Brown has gone a combined 113-78-1.