College football insider predicts breakup for Mack Brown, UNC

In a very real sense, head coach Mack Brown is North Carolina football.

The Tar Heels are a basketball school thanks to their rich history and six NCAA Championships, but Brown has done some great work with the football program. To many fans, he’s known as a championship-winning coach at Texas, but Brown coached at UNC from 1988 to 1997 and then again from 2019 to current day.

He’s a North Carolina legend, without a doubt, with a 110-77-1 record as Tar Heels head coach, but his team is currently in the midst of a rough patch. They won the first three games of their season but have since lost four straight.

Brown has a 3-4 program at 73 years old. Confidence in his ability to keep the Tar Heels relevant may be wavering in Chapel Hill and one college football insider, ESPN’s Pete Thamel, thinks the end of the relationship between Brown is UNC is near.

“I don’t know how the end is going to happen quite yet, but I think there’s an expectation in the industry that it does happen at some point,” Thamel said on “The College GameDay” podcast (h/t On3). “We all know Mack Brown, we all really like Mack Brown, he’s very image-conscious.”

Thamel mentioned that there’s a lot of goodwill between the North Carolina brass and Brown, but there always comes a time when the rubber meets the road and a change is needed.

“They made five straight bowl games,” Thamel said, “he’s done that place right, but they’re amid a four-game losing streak right now. It just doesn’t seem like there’s a way out for him to be the coach there next year.”

UNC has games at Virginia, at Florida State, against Wake Forest, at Boston College and against NC State remaining. Those teams have a combined 18-18 record so it’s not like the Tar Heels have a terrible schedule ahead of them.

At the very least, Brown must get UNC to bowl eligibility, but even if he does, it sounds like that may not be enough to keep this run going much longer.