Mack Brown planning to remain North Carolina head coach beyond 2024

Mack Brown is telling recruits he plans to remain at North Carolina beyond the 2024 season, On3’s Pete Nakos reported. The decision comes amid speculation about his potential retirement.

Brown, 73, is wrapping up his sixth season back at UNC – his second stint with the program. He previously coached the Tar Heels from 1988-97 before taking over at Texas from 1998-2013.

North Carolina takes a 6-4 record into Saturday’s game against Boston College. On the whole, the Tar Heels are 44-31 in Brown’s second stint in Chapel Hill – including an ACC Coastal title in 2022.

During an appearance on SiriusXM, Brown hinted he wasn’t quite ready to walk away from the sideline yet. Although he has his issues with NIL and the transfer portal in the ever-changing landscape, he knows his job is more than that. It’s about molding young men both on and off the field.

“I love the organization of football,” Brown said. “I love fixing things that are broken, I love planning for a game, the strategy that goes into it. But most of the time – I’ll get mad at transfer portal, I’ll get mad at NIL, I’ll get mad about this, I’ll be mad at the university. Then, I’ll go down and eat lunch with the players and say, ‘You know what? This is why I’m here.’ When I see one with his head down or he’s got some joy because his sister won a contest or won a basketball game or he lost a girlfriend or flunked a test or dropped a ball on Saturday, that’s my purpose. My purposes it to fix him, and try to help him get to a better place.

“And what I did at Texas, I started planning on trying to retire, and it didn’t work. I wasn’t as good at what I was doing … I was trying to make sure everybody was okay. I decided this time that I wouldn’t do that. I’m gonna work as hard as I can every day of my life to do what I’m supposed to do. And right now, my role is to help the young people. To do that, you’ve got to win games or you can’t stay. Everybody knows that. That’s the modern business.”

Mack Brown has a career 288-153-1 record as a head coach – a career that began at Tulane in 1985 after 10 years as an assistant. As for whether he’s lost the drive, he made it clear that’s not the case.

“My job right now, more importantly, is to make sure these young people are okay and they’re growing mentally, they’re growing emotionally, they’ve got confidence and they’re gonna leave our program better than they came in,” Brown said. “And that was the promise I made their parents.

“I also promised – Sally and I talked about this hard before I got back in – that there’ll be a day I wake up and say, ‘You know what? Somebody else needs to be doing this. I’m not excited about going out recruiting.’ And I haven’t gotten to that yet.”