UNC Football: Is Mack Brown on the hot seat in Chapel Hill?

The UNC football program was expected to make big strides toward ACC supremacy and national relevance in 2021 but that simply isn’t how things turned out.

Mack Brown is entering the fourth season of his second go-round with the North Carolina Tar Heels and things haven’t exactly gone the way we thought they would.

We knew, of course, that a re-build was needed in Chapel Hill before an underachieving UNC squad would have any shot at competing, even in an Atlantic Coast Conference that doesn’t currently have a program threatening to win a national championship.

But here we are, more than three years into Brown’s second stint with the seldom successful and often criticized Tar Heels, and the team’s 21-17 record during that stretch has a number of UNC fans concerned. It also has Brown nearing the “hot seat” according to some, including Rivals’ Sam Marsdale, who in a recent piece listed Brown as a coach in need of a quick turnaround.

"“This season was supposed to be one in which North Carolina pushed Clemson for an ACC title. It was far from that,” Marsdale said. “The Tar Heels finished 6-7, capped off by a loss in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl to South Carolina that was not close. The 70-year-old is 21-17 in his second tenure at UNC, and says he has no plans of retiring. The Tar Heels lost a handful of skill position players to the 2021 NFL Draft, but Brown and staff will have to adjust even more in 2022. Three-year starter Sam Howell is off to the NFL, and the Tar Heels have a new quarterback.”"

Marsdale highlights some of the challenges that Brown and the Tar Heels will be facing in 2022, not the least of which is their vacancy at the quarterback position left by the departure of junior standout Sam Howell.

They’ll also have to deal with the losses of offensive linemen Joshua Ezeudu, Marcus McKethan and Jordan Tucker, all of whom have declared for the 2022 NFL Draft. They also bid farewell to a dozen players who entered to NCAA transfer portal following the season, including Eugene Asante (Auburn), Khafre Brown and Cylde Pinder Jr. (USF) and Beau Corrales (SMU) among others.

The Tar Heels’ defense will also be under the direction of a new defensive coordinator since the program parted ways with Jay Bateman after yet another disappointing performance in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

Needless to say, Brown and the Tar Heels will have some hoops to jump through in order to get back on the right track. In the minds of at least a few, that’s what Brown will need to do in order to keep his position with the program in good standing.

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