Mack Brown explains how fall break, crowd aided in Virginia loss

The North Carolina Tar Heels ACC championship and College Football Playoff hopes took a massive blow on Saturday as they were upset by the Virginia Cavaliers at home 31-27. For many, this defeat was shocking and unforeseen. But was it both of those things for Tar Heels head coach Mack Brown?

According to the North Carolina headman, there were no signs that pointed to his program’s surpring home loss. But there are reasons why their loss makes sense to him.

“No, other than every team in the country has one of these usually: fall break, crowd wasn’t as good as last week, absolutely no hype about the game, nobody’s talking about the game, everybody said we’re gonna kill them,” said Brown. “I mean, there’s so many boxes that you could check. But I thought we addressed it all week, and we did everything we could do until the night to get it where it needed to be. And we didn’t. Somehow, we missed the message.”

Brown knew North Carolina could lose to Virginia, as upsets are a part of every college football season. The Tar Heels headman did everything in his power to ensure that complacency and hype did not affect his team, something that Alabama head coach Nick Saban coined “rat poison.” In the end, the Tar Heels could not match the intensity that the Cavaliers brought into Week 8 and Brown with a sense of disappointment. But his feeling of disappointment is not for the reason most would think it is.

“There’s upsets every week. I walked in and told our team that Oklahoma was down early, and they were at home and supposed to kill somebody. So be careful, be smart. But that is still brains, still human beings, and some listen, some don’t. That’s the disappointing thing.”

“They will be more disappointed than any of our fans, or anybody could be. I’m disappointed, but I’m disappointed for them that they’ll be crushed. That’s part of this business, part of what you have to learn from. And you gotta learn from losing. We walk in here and handle it after we’ve won every week, and we can walk around and cut up. If you lose, you gotta handle it, you gotta own it; that’s what you do,” said Brown.

North Carolina’s conference championship hopes remain alive as they are tied for second in the conference with the Louisville Cardinals at 3-1 in the ACC. Brown and the Tar Heels can ill afford another loss if they want to keep their championship hopes alive. But that means they must quickly bounce back from this Virginia loss in Week 9 as they take on the program that started their four-game losing streak to end last season, Georgia Tech, on the road.