Mack Brown explains how to reset for bowl game after 'demoralizing' loss

Nothing about the end of North Carolina’s season was ideal. The Tar Heels finished on a three-game losing streak that was capitalized by a 39-10 loss to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game. Now, Mack Brown has to find his way to get his team prepared to end that stretch later this month in their bowl game.

Brown shared some of his thoughts during his postgame press conference following the loss to the Tigers in Charlotte. He said, first and foremost, that he’s happy that people are upset about them losing this much as it signifies a shift in the culture around football in Chapel Hill.

“Every loss is demoralizing because you want to win so bad,” Brown said. “You want expectations. People get mad when you lose. That’s good because they didn’t care when we got here. Wasn’t anybody in the stands, nobody cared if we won five games and lost 18 in two years. So I’m really glad people are mad. That’s a positive.”

If that’s the case, the UNC faithful had plenty to be upset with in how their team ended their campaign. They lost to Georgia Tech, rival NC State, and then to the Tigers to round out their season following a 9-1 start.

North Carolina played with fire throughout the year and it burned them three straight times to close. Not capitalizing on opportunities against Clemson only further underlined those issues. Fixing that, among other key things, is what he wants to focus on cleaning up so that the same thing that’s happened to them as of late won’t happen against Oregon in the Holiday Bowl.

“We’ve got to get better. You’ve got to learn from it. You got hard things in life and you’ve got to take negatives and turn them into positives,” said Brown. “We knew this wasn’t gonna be easy. If we’d asked anybody in here, nobody in here would have picked us. We had our chances to play better. We had our chance to be in the game.”

“Were there a lot of great things tonight? Yeah. Were we awful? No. Should we have gotten beat this bad? No. We allowed things to happen that let the game (and) the score get out of what it should have been.”