Mack Brown fires jab at Notre Dame in question about scheduling

North Carolina, theoretically, has a pretty easy go of things playing North Carolina Central — an FCS team — on Saturday. But head coach Mack Brown sought to caution against considering any opponent an easy win.

And unfortunately for Marcus Freeman and Notre Dame, the Irish caught a stray from the North Carolina head coach, as he referenced the upset loss to Northern Illinois over the weekend.

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“If you talked to Coach Freeman today, would you ask if Northern Illinois was a good team to be on the schedule?” Brown said, shrugging and sticking his hands up, palms facing upwards.

He continued, going into a long-winded answer about how he wants his team to play with consistent effort and ferocity each time out. He’s understanding that bad plays and games might happen, but he won’t tolerate a lack of effort against any opponent.

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“I don’t have anything to do with the schedule, it was done before I got here, our job is to coach to the standard and play the best we can play every week,” Brown said. “The one thing that I said, at the first of the press conference, is we’re seeing teams do this. And you can’t do that. Great teams, the Tom Osborne Nebraska teams always amazed me because it didn’t matter who they played, they played great. And they were excited. And that’s what I wanted at Texas. And we got so we were doing that. We haven’t done that here. We’ve played up and down here. And I hate it. I hate seeing kids get hurt, I hate seeing kids get in trouble, and I hate teams that don’t play as hard as they can play, every week. Those three things just are unacceptable. The other two, it changes their lives. This one changes football at North Carolina and our lives.

“And so we’re trying so hard to change that culture where we play the hardest. You’re not ever going to play the best you can play every week, you’re going to make some good plays and bad plays. That’s kids with football. But, you can play hard every week. I told the guys: You practiced every day of spring practice hard and you’re practicing three days a week. You practiced every day of preseason hard and you’re hitting every day. Why in the world do you come out here in practice in pads Tuesday and Wednesday and can’t be ready for Saturday? It makes absolutely no sense.”

Brown kept on rolling in his answer about scheduling winnable games and keeping the winning edge among his players and team.

“And part of it is, we’ve got a problem with this, we’ve got social media now,” Brown said, holding up his iPhone. “So we sit there and saw how good we are and how great things are and we can’t possibly lose and then you start feeling good about yourself and then you can’t prepare. So we have talked to the guys every day about how you win and how you lose and you need to be positive, you need to be focused. You need to be ready to practice and you need to do the best you can every day. And we told them yesterday when we left practice, that you’ve got 36 hours to prepare for Tuesday’s practice. And the — if you tell me what you did in those 36 hours, I can tell you whether you’re going to play good or not.

“If you stayed up till 2 o’clock on your phone last night, playing video games, you’re probably not going to practice good. If you don’t practice good Tuesday, you’re probably not going to play good. So, it is really, really hard to be great. And to do that, you’ve got to every little thing right. And usually when we say, ‘You lost because you made too many mistakes,’ no, you lost because you weren’t ready to play and that’s why you made too many mistakes. When you’re ready to play, you usually play good. We played hard Saturday. I was really proud of them. And that was after a tough, physical game at Minnesota when we got back at six in the morning. But I was proud of them. Now we’ve gotta go the same thing again this week.”