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Birth of a Salesman

Photo by Jeffrey A. Camarati/Athletic Communications

Mack Brown learned the intricacies of recruiting the way most coaches do — the hard way. Those lessons never have been more important than now.

by Tim Crothers ’86

It began with a telegram from the Bear.

In fall 1968, legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant sent a telegram to Putnam County High School in Cookeville, Tenn. The school’s principal, Bill May, rushed the telegram to football coach Bucky Pitts, who then delivered it to a 12th grader named Mack Brown. Soon everybody in the school knew that Brown had been offered a football scholarship to Alabama — just as Bryant had planned it.

That telegram wound up framed on the wall in Brown’s home, just as Bryant had planned it. After learning that May was a zealous Alabama fan, Bryant phoned the school and May giddily announced over the intercom: Would Mack Brown please report to the office, Coach Bear Bryant from Alabama is on hold waiting for you. Brown was BMOC, just as Bryant had planned it.

Bryant was on his way to becoming Brown’s coaching idol, so imagine the 17-year-old’s thoughts as he sat alone with the Bear in the coach’s office in Tuscaloosa in January 1969 during a campus recruiting visit. Brown noticed how Bryant asked questions about his family and repeatedly referred to him by his first name during their conversation to help build a bond between them. Bryant switched on a projector and showed a film clip of his Crimson Tide returning a punt against Missouri in the 1968 Gator Bowl. He then turned to Brown with a distinct gleam in his eye and said: “This is what you can do, Mack. You can play safety for us, and you can return kicks. You’ll make a difference. We really need you here.”

“Coach Bryant was selling me on a dream,” Brown remembers. “Then all of a sudden he added, ‘But you’re not going to come.’ ”

A surprised Brown replied, “Coach, I want to come.”

Bryant responded, “Your brother’s at Vanderbilt, and your Mom and Dad are really, really close to you two. They’re not going to let you come down here.”

“That’s not true,” Brown assured the coach. “Mom and Dad told me I can do what I want.”

Today Brown chuckles at his own innocence. “In the end, Mom and Dad told me to go to Vanderbilt,” Brown says sheepishly. “Coach Bryant was exactly right. He read the situation perfectly. Those were my first recruiting lessons.”

Mack Brown

Brown parlayed his success in the 1990s into a push for dramatic improvement of Carolina’s facilities. The work continued after he left. A new indoor practice field was waiting when he returned. (Photo by Grant Halverson ’93)

When Brown was green

Though some have tried and failed, no coach in major college football history has ever built a successful program (and, in this case, left it for 20 years), then returned and managed to rebuild it to its previous heights. Since accepting the UNC job in November, that is Mack Brown’s challenge, and to get there he will have to do what he does best. Sell.

You don’t earn the nickname “Mr. February” by whiffing on many five-star prospects. Brown’s recruiting skills derive from a lifetime of lessons on salesmanship. Early in his football career at Vanderbilt, he acquired another.

Mack’s older brother, Watson, was playing quarterback at Vanderbilt during a game in his sophomore season when he severely injured his knee and found himself in the hospital. Mack was called in by a Commodores coach and told to visit his brother and inform him that the coaches planned to shift Watson to wide receiver after his recovery. Mack delivered the news. Watson fumed and demanded that the coach come and tell him himself.


You don’t earn the nickname “Mr. February” by whiffing on many five-star prospects.


“So that coach goes over there to see Watson, and the coach  says, ‘Oh no, Mack misunderstood, we never, ever told him that,’ ” Brown recalled. “So, I go back to see my brother, and he asks me why I told him that. I said, ‘Because that’s what he told me. Point blank.’ So I walked back to the coach’s office, and I said, ‘This is what you told me, and then you lied to my brother, and I’m quitting.’ I walked out of there and transferred to Florida State because I knew I could never trust that coach again.”

Brown sat out his initial season at Florida State due to transfer rules, but during that first year in Tallahassee, he mentioned to Seminole tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator Mike Pope that he aspired to coach college football someday. Pope put Brown in charge of organizing recruiting visits and taught him how to be an effective host, how to ask the right questions to gauge a prospect’s interests and make the most of each visit. After Brown suffered a career-ending knee injury, he was hired as a graduate assistant coach and eventually coached the Seminoles freshman team in 1974. When the 23-year-old ventured out on recruiting trips, Brown was green.

One evening he traveled to watch a high school game in Fort Myers, scouting from the bleachers beside two Seminoles boosters. “As I look back I had no clue, but I was trying to act like I was cool and like I knew what I was doing. I saw an offensive lineman that we were looking at, and I turned to the boosters and said, ‘His feet aren’t good enough, so we aren’t going to take him.’ His mother was sitting right behind me. She blistered me and called our head coach and said, ‘How rude of your young coach to talk poorly about my son!’ ”

To this day, Brown has never again uttered a single word about a recruit outside the walls of his own staff meetings.

Snow

The first recruiting weekend Mack Brown ever hosted as a head coach occurred at Appalachian State in December 1982 at the tail end of a blizzard. He had 12 prospects scheduled to visit the campus in Boone. There were 28 inches of new snow on the ground, and temperatures plummeted near the single digits. Brown didn’t even have a recruiting video yet, but as he cued up the university’s generic promotional tape, he was thinking about how he should try to emphasize the idea that Boone wasn’t always this arctic. The video began to play, and it was all about snowscapes and skiing and the fabulous winter activities available to prospective Mountaineer students. Brown rolled his eyes. Later that afternoon, one recruit after another marched into the head coach’s office with the same miserable look.

Brown won just two games in his first two seasons in Chapel Hill, but hope gradually transformed into reality as he eventually would lead Carolina to three 10-win seasons, six straight bowl games and two top 10 finishes in the polls. (Photo by Grant Halverson ’93)

“The first 11 kids came in, and they were all freezing. All 11 said, ‘Coach, I’m not coming here. This is so cold. I’m outta here.’ ”

The last of the recruits to enter Brown’s office that weekend was John Settle, the most coveted prospect of the group. Settle was being recruited by N.C. State and UNC as a blocking fullback. Brown knew he had one advantage. He could sell Settle on a dream. “I told him, ‘John, you can be our tailback and carry the ball 30 times a game. We really need you here.’ But I’d been pretty beaten up by then, so I continued by saying, ‘I know there’s a lot of snow … ’ ”

Settle interrupted him: “ ‘Coach, I’ve always dreamed of playing in the snow. This is so cool.’ ”

Brown couldn’t believe his luck.

“Settle ran for more than 4,000 yards for us, and then he played for the Atlanta Falcons,”  said Brown, with a gleam in his eye. “So, you never know. You never know what they want. You never know what excites them. That day I learned a great lesson that in recruiting if you throw enough paint on the wall, some of it’s going to stick.”

The uphill climb

Brown smiles at the memory of his first season as the UNC coach in 1988, walking into his office at the old Kenan Field House with floors so warped that he needed to climb uphill to reach his desk.

“Looking back on it, I had no idea how bad off we really were. Our recruiting message was very positive and upbeat. It was all about selling hope.”

In the lean years, Woody Durham ’63 asked, “Do you think you’re going to make it?” Brown said the question was not whether, just when. Eventually he got the shoulder rides. (Athletic Communications)

In those initial seasons, Brown decided to rely on the irresistible closing line he’d learned from Bryant while sitting in his office two decades earlier. Brown employed it with a bit more anxiety than the Bear once did, because for Bryant it had been like summoning a landscaper to tend to some stubborn azaleas; for Brown it was like speed-dialing a plumber while water spewed all over the kitchen.

We really need you here.

“Corey Holliday could have gone to a thriving program at Virginia, so why did he come here when we were 1-10? Rick Steinbacher could have gone to Penn State or Clemson. Why did he come here? Tommy Thigpen was one of the top linebackers in the country. He could have gone anywhere. Why did he come here? We were selling that this is The University of North Carolina, and we were selling fun, and we were selling playing early because we could, but we felt like a lot of it was that we really needed them.”

During one of the lean years early in his Tar Heel coaching career, Brown recalls a conversation with UNC’s radio voice, the late Woody Durham ’63.

“Do you think you’re going to make it?” a concerned Durham asked Brown.

“The question is not whether we’re going to make it or not,” Brown replied. “I know we’re going to make it. The question is, when?”

Brown won just two games in his first two seasons in Chapel Hill, but hope gradually transformed into reality as Brown eventually would lead Carolina to three 10-win seasons, six straight bowl games and two top 10 finishes in the polls.

Take the ones you like

“I was sitting in my office at UNC on a Thursday morning in the early ’90s with former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, who was broadcasting the ABC game that weekend, and he said, ‘Can we go to dinner tonight?’ ” Brown remembered. “I was excited. We sat down to dinner that night and right off I asked him, ‘How do you recruit? How do you separate the kids in the end? If you’ve got 14 left and you can only sign four of them, how do you decide which four to take?’

“Bo said, ‘They all have great ability, but you need to take the ones you like. If you don’t like them, they’re going to feel it and they’ll have no loyalty to you. But if you like them, they’re going to like you. And if they like you, they’re going to play hard for you in the fourth quarter.’ That made so much sense to me.”

No salesman closes every deal. After Brown left UNC for Texas in December 1997, he was criticized for missing on in-state targets like Matthew Stafford, Robert Griffin III, Andrew Luck and Adrian Peterson.


[Y]ou need to take the ones you like. If you don’t like them, they’re going to feel it and they’ll have no loyalty to you. But if you like them, they’re going to like you. And if they like you, they’re going to play hard for you in the fourth quarter.

– Michigan coach Bo Schembechler’s recruiting advice to Mack Brown

Sometimes he didn’t even sign the prospects he knew he’d get.

“I had a great recruit at tight end tell me once that he was coming. Called me right before he went on TV to announce it, and he told me, ‘Are you watching? You’re going to throw it to the tight end, right?’ I said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘OK, I’m going to be a Longhorn.’ ”

Brown watched the announcement alongside his wife, Sally. The tight end had three baseball caps on the table in front of him. He picked up the Texas hat and put it back down. Then he picked up another school’s hat as the broadcast cut to a commercial break. “I said to Sally, ‘Boy, he’s really playing with that other school.’ Sally said, ‘I don’t think he’s playing with that other school. I think he’s playing with you!’ She was right, of course, and I never spoke to that kid again.”

It’s another lesson Brown has channeled from Bear Bryant, who displayed a unique gift for sensing which recruits eventually would sign with Alabama and which would not, including Brown himself.

“I learned that obviously I didn’t ask that kid enough questions. I didn’t know him well enough. I learned that you don’t ever want surprises in recruiting, and you never want to finish second. That means you’ve wasted a lot of time and you’ve lost four or five other guys at that position that you could have gotten. You need to be first or get out before it’s too late.”

Vince Young didn’t grow up dreaming of playing for the University of Texas. As the Houston native prepared to make his college decision in 2002, it looked like he might be another stud Texas quarterback prospect Brown might not get.

Young had concerns about Texas because the Longhorns hadn’t played many African American quarterbacks. “Vince needed my word that I would play him at quarterback,” Brown remembers. “I told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll start, I can’t promise you you’ll play, but quarterback will be your position.’ ”

In Young’s sophomore season at Texas in 2004, he played poorly in a shutout loss to Oklahoma. The next week against Missouri, he completed five passes, three to Texas and two to Missouri, before Brown subbed him out. As Young struggled during the following week’s practices, Brown admits that he was tempted to shift Young away from quarterback, but he recalled the promise he’d made to him in recruiting and the lesson he’d once learned from a Vanderbilt coach’s lie.

After a bad pregame warmup the next Saturday at Texas Tech, Brown told Young: “I can’t keep you as the starter if you don’t play better. I promised you I won’t move you, but I can’t keep you as the starter.”

Young responded by completing 10 of 15 passes and rushing for 158 yards as Texas blew out the Red Raiders 51-21. Young would go on to win his final 22 games as the starting quarterback at Texas, including the 2005 national championship.

A walk with the family: Brown and his wife, Sally, came back to find some Brown-era Tar Heels never left. Rick Steinbacher ’93, left, and Corey Holliday ’93 (’97 MA) got in on the winning as players and now are associate athletics directors at Carolina. (Chris Brown/Athletic Communications)

Paint against the wall

To sell UNC football back into relevance, Brown will pitch from Murphy to Manteo, Albemarle to Zebulon. After learning from Bryant about the power of a family’s pull to stay close to home, Brown wants to construct the Tar Heels as he did before, from the inside out. During the final season of Brown’s first tenure at UNC in 1997, when the Tar Heels finished 11-1, he had 64 in-state players on the roster. (In 2018, less than half of the Tar Heel roster came from North Carolina.)

“Another thing that I’ve always believed is that recruits need to know how badly we want them. Everybody thinks these guys are so conceited because they’re being chased by all these schools, but they’re really insecure teenagers. They’re getting a lot of attention, but when it comes right down to it, they’re asking themselves, ‘Why do you want me? Am I really this good?’ You have to tell them.”

“Another thing that I’ve always believed is that recruits need to know how badly we want them … They’re getting a lot of attention, but when it comes right down to it, they’re asking themselves, ‘Why do you want me? Am I really this good?’ You have to tell them.” (Photo by Grant Halverson ’93)

We really need you here.

At his signing ceremony in December, four-star wide receiver prospect Emery Simmons from Parkton, credited Brown with swaying him away from Penn State to UNC. “[Brown] played a huge part in it,” Simmons said after he committed. “But at the same time, I felt like it was meant for me to kind of stay home and kind of put this team back on the map and have it to where it used to be.” You can hear Brown’s recruiting pitch echoing in Simmons’ words.

Brown also persuaded four-star receiver Khafre Brown from Charlotte to choose Carolina over Alabama, and four-star quarterback Sam Howell from Monroe flipped from Florida State. In just a few months with Mack Brown at the helm, the Tar Heels’ 2019 recruiting class ranking rose more than 30 places.

During the four decades since that snowy day in Boone, Brown has learned always to ask enough questions to avoid finishing second on a recruit. He’ll never talk down a recruit publicly, never promise what he can’t deliver and always throw enough paint against the wall so that some will stick. When in doubt, he’ll offer scholarships to the players he genuinely likes, addressing them regularly by their first names, and he’ll laud his staff, which these days includes nameplates like Holliday and Steinbacher and Thigpen as proof of how well Tar Heel football takes care of its own.


Just like 31 years ago when he took the job for the first time, the question is the same: Brown still has no doubt he is going to win. But there is a heightened sense of urgency.  … He has stated repeatedly since his introductory news conference that he intends to win “now.”


Brown, who will be paid a salary and supplementals that come to just shy of $4 million a year, understands that “Mr. February” sounds a whole lot more like a compliment in February than it does in November. Just like 31 years ago when he took the job for the first time, the question is the same: Brown still has no doubt he is going to win. But there is a heightened sense of urgency. As he begins his second stint, he is convinced that this time around he has better facilities and a better-inherited roster. The coach who turned 68 four days before the 2019 season opener against South Carolina insists that he doesn’t have the patience for a complete rebuild. He has stated repeatedly since his introductory news conference that he intends to win “now.”

One April morning in Brown’s office, which no longer requires an uphill climb to his desk, the coach shows off a large jewelry box filled with 39 rings and watches, the spoils of his coaching career. Brown is talking about pitching dreams again. He pulls out the national championship ring that he rarely wears except for recruiting visits and mentions how he encourages prospects to try on the ring and how he also likes to hand them the crystal national championship trophy so that they can snap selfies with it.

“Some people might find that arrogant, but we think it shows that we know what we’re doing.”

Brown gets that familiar gleam in his eye. Another recruit will be visiting shortly.

Time to sell some more hope.

Tim Crothers ’86, a lecturer in UNC’s School of Media and Journalism, is the author of three books and hundreds of stories for Sports Illustrated.

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