Mack Brown expertly hammers ACC officiating without implicitly calling out the officials

North Carolina coach Mack Brown is extremely upset with the current state of officiating. After several calls didn’t go the Tar Heels’ way in a 45-32 loss to Notre Dame on Saturday, he set out to offer a solution.

Although Brown isn’t permitted to talk about officiating in his own games without facing punishment from the ACC, he found a clever loophole around it in his Monday press conference. That led to a long-winded rant from the coach on what he feels are the biggest issues.

“I can’t talk about officiating in our game or I get suspended — which I don’t think is a good rule, but that’s what the rule states,” Brown began. “So I’m gonna talk a little bit about national officiating. When you start looking at officiating across the country, who are these guys? These are men that care so much about football. They’re very passionate and they work hard all week and then they come and referee a game — usually on national TV — under tremendous scrutiny like the players and the coaches. So you have to really admire who they are and the passion they have.

“But the problem I’ve got with national (officiating) is the inconsistency. What is pass interference anymore? You sit and watch TV and I don’t know. I’m not sure you shouldn’t throw it deep every time and just hope you get a call. So I’d like to see more consistency in calling pass interference on a national level. I would like to see more consistency on calling holding. What is holding? Because those two calls make more difference in college football than anything else. Then I’d like to see more consistency in celebration. As long as you’re not taunting the other team, we’ll allow a defensive lineman to go dance after a sack. But we won’t allow a receiver to drop the ball and spin it a little bit. Not in anybody’s face. I’d like for us to go back and revisit the celebration rule so we can be more consistent on what that means.”

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Brown mentioning pass interference first was no accident. After Notre Dame quarterback Drew Pyne‘s pass to Chris Tyree on 4th-and-goal fell incomplete on fourth down, it looked like the Tar Heels forced a turnover on downs. However, officials threw a flag and called Cedric Gray for pass interference in the end zone.

Brown vehemently disagreed with the call, throwing his hat and drawing another flag for unsportsmanlike conduct against him as a result.

In total, North Carolina was called for nine penalties for 64 yards on Saturday. Mack Brown went on to list a couple more things he would change about officiating, including how targeting is enforced.

“The last one is targeting,” Brown said. “It’s really, really hard when a 5-foot-9 guy is running the ball and he’s turning the corner and there’s absolutely no target area for a defensive back to hit him. So it’s gonna be targeting if a receiver, running back or somebody is running really low. What do you do? You’ve gotta try to hit him with your shoulder. So we’ve gotta continue to revisit those.

“I still wish targeting would be a 15-yard penalty and not take him out of the game unless they felt like it was such an awful penalty because it was dangerous to the other player. Let ’em play. If it’s an unprotected player and you’re taking a shot at his head, get him out of the game. Everybody understands that. But don’t go hurt them.”

Finally, Brown offered his last solution for officials to ensure they are getting the aforementioned calls correct.

“The last thing about officiating is I think it should be upstairs,” Mack Brown said. “If there is a bad call on the field or a missed call on the field, have your best official with replay. They replay everything mostly, but don’t have anything you can’t replay. Don’t have the official come over. Don’t have him stand there for five minutes. Don’t slow the game down. But have the guy upstairs call down and say, ‘The right tackle was holding. He took the guy down. Call a 15-yard penalty.’ Instead of having human error and having the game lost. We had four coaches fired in this league last year. We had one fired yesterday. Winning is important. And when you say, ‘Why did that coach look so passionate?’ This is what we do. ‘Why are those kids so passionate?’ They put tremendous pressure on themselves to win games. That’s what we do.

“So we have human error with coaches, we have human errors with players. Why don’t we take the human error away from officials by having them call it upstairs? Would it take longer? Everybody says, ‘Well, we don’t want more replays.’ It wouldn’t be. All he has to do is look at it and say, ‘That was a penalty. The guy grabbed him and you didn’t see it. Holding on 15.’ That’s as simple as it has to be. He sees everything upstairs. The guys on the field have a very difficult job because we substitute more than ever. We go faster than ever and it’s impossible to see everything. Upstairs you’ve got time to see it and replay it before the snap of the ball. That’s something I’d like to see.”