ESPN insider Pete Thamel details what led to Mack Brown's firing at North Carolina

On Monday, Mack Brown declared without hesitation that he intended to be North Carolina‘s head football coach in 2025.

On Tuesday, UNC AD Bubba Cunningham informed the 73-year-old Brown that he was being let go after six seasons — and 16 total over two separate stints in Chapel Hill — and put out an official statement announcing a change in leadership.

“He was fired, there’s no gray area there. And I don’t think North Carolina wanted to fire Mack Brown,” ESPN’s Pete Thamel said this week on the College GameDay Podcast. “There were a lot of rumblings the last two weeks of Mack telling people on his staff that he was coming back. … But what was absent from all that rhetoric were the wide-open invitations from North Carolina to be like, ‘Yes, we look forward to Mack Brown returning,’ like there was none of that.

“So I think midseason after the JMU loss and the Duke loss, I was pretty convicted that Mack was going to be gone one way or another. … Mack gobbled up some power back with some wins, and I think Mack really wanted to stay and he thought he could win his way to one more year to go out the way he wanted.”

Following a four-game losing streak in the heart of the season, with began with an embarrassing 70-50 home defeat against James Madison, UNC won three in a row to give the Tar Heels and Brown hope. But that all ended with last week’s 41-21 loss at Boston College. By that point, the writing was on the wall.

“They were a non-competitive football team against a mediocre ACC team, and they were a non-competitive football team against James Madison, who’s a good but not great Sun Belt team,” Thamel said. “I just think the Carolina brass, when you take out the emotion and take out the sentimentality, just said we need to change the direction of where we’re going. … Bubba Cunningham obviously made this decision, but I think he’s doing it in concert with leadership and a board that is not just focused on the ACC.”

Pete Thamel: ‘There’s a next step for Carolina’

The North Carolina administration, currently embroiled in a legal dispute with the ACC, clearly has their eyes on finding a new conference home at some point. With that in mind, the Tar Heels’ entire athletic department must be as appealing as possible, and that requires football becoming a valuable asset.

“Like there’s a next step for Carolina if the whole world shakes differently. Those things aren’t talked about a lot, but I think they loom large in a lot of these decisions as they go,” Thamel said. “UNC needs its football program to be in the Top 25, it needs its football program to be competitive and attractive. And they’ve been good under Mack Brown, and they’ve had some really nice moments under Mack Brown. … They are much better, he will leave them much better than when he arrived after Larry Fedora, which really, really spiraled at the end.”

College GameDay host Rece Davis believes Brown’s press conference declaration of his pending return forced Cunningham’s hand.

“It looked as if (Brown) tried to force their hand after maybe some early disillusionment in the season led them to the belief that everybody was sort of on the same page and it would be handled gracefully. Then when he changed his mind, it looked like he was trying to force their hand,” Davis added. “That’s what it looks like to me, … that Mack thought he had enough power to sort of steamroll his way through, and he didn’t. … In this case he didn’t.”

So, while Brown’s firing may have caught many around the college football world off guard, it wasn’t completely out of leftfield.

“Mack Brown not being the coach of Carolina in 2025 is not surprising to me,” Thamel said. “Like, is it surprising he was fired less than 24 hours from saying he intended to be back? Yes. That’s surprising. Because it’s almost a very un-Carolina move. Right? Carolina is not like Auburn with coordinators, it’s not a kneecap kind of place. And I think that tells you a little window into their conviction and a little bit of their annoyance into how he handled the last two weeks.”

Steelers’ Arthur Smith reveals contact level with Tar Heels

Now the Tar Heels jump to the front of line in the 2024 coaching carousel and are already drawing interest from big names such as Steelers offensive coordinator and UNC alum Arthur Smith, Tulane‘s Jon Sumrall, as well as former Florida and Mississippi State coach-turned-ESPN analyst Dan Mullen.

Smith recently shared that he had a preliminary call with North Carolina about the head coach opening. He also made sure to emphasize that he’s happy with where he is in Pittsburgh and that these are the beginning stages of a job search when many candidates are being looked into.

“It would be really interesting to see if there is a power coach who emerges from a P4 league as a head coach to go to Carolina to change things up. You know, some of those names might be Dave Clawson, PJ Fleck – a guy, you know, who’s had very good success and those things,” Thamel said. “I think Jon Sumrall is on that list from Tulane. He’s done an excellent job – two straight Sun Belts and has a shot to win the American, I think Bob Chesney going in and hanging 70 in their stadium gets him on the list, right, from James Madison.”