Mack Brown's uneasy future has North Carolina leading college football's Week 4 Misery Index

We live in a society that struggles with the concept of age. People are living longer, working longer and becoming more resistant to the idea that they’re supposed to fade into the background and pass the torch to a new generation.

In some ways, it’s aspirational. We all want to be vibrant and productive in our 70s and 80s. At the same time, hanging on to power looks selfish and delusional when the results are no longer there. 

North Carolina coach Mack Brown, now 73 years old, has had an incredible life in college football. It began as a head coach in 1983 when Appalachian State made him a head coach at age 32. It brought him to Tulane, then North Carolina, then Texas where he won a national championship and had a decade-long run of success few have ever matched. 

Brown eventually went to the television booth when his run at Texas went south, but he always wanted one more shot on the sidelines. North Carolina and athletics director Bubba Cunningham gave it to him in 2019, when Brown vowed that his goal was to win a national title at a place that meant so much in his life and career. 

It seemed really romantic back then. Now, it seems ridiculous. 

Brown isn’t going to win another national title. Will he even make it through this season?

After North Carolina’s embarrassing 70-50 loss to James Madison on Saturday, Inside Carolina reported that Brown’s emotional speech in the locker room suggested he was going to walk away. But after cooling off, Brown told ESPN he would be back at work on Sunday. 

This isn’t sustainable. 

Here are the facts. In his second stint at North Carolina, Brown’s record is 41-28. In his first four years, the Tar Heels have been ranked at the end of the season just once: No. 17 in the final poll of 2020. That’s particularly disappointing when he's had elite-level quarterbacks like Sam Howell and Drake Maye on his roster until this year. The loss to James Madison underscores the problems Brown has had with his defensive coordinators, from Jay Bateman to Gene Chizik and now Geoff Collins, the former Georgia Tech head coach. 

Has it been a disaster in the big picture? No, not at North Carolina, which has always been one of college football’s biggest underachievers. But has Mack’s second stint in Chapel Hill been a success? It would be disingenuous to say yes.

At an age when all of his contemporaries have left the stage, does it make sense for Brown to be hanging on? Not if the goal is for North Carolina to have a football program that contends for ACC and national titles. 

It’s sad and uncomfortable and uncouth to talk about so bluntly, but even a beloved Hall of Famer like Brown reaches a point where it no longer makes sense to run a college football program that is trying to win at the highest level. 

Losing in such awful fashion to James Madison will supercharge that conversation. And that’s why North Carolina is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst. 

Four more in misery

TCU: Since appearing in the College Football Playoff national championship game — and yes, said appearing rather than playing because the Horned Frogs didn’t play much football that night against Georgia — TCU has lost nine of its last 16 games. And the frustration of that predicament manifested Saturday when Sonny Dykes lost his cool on multiple occasions and was ejected early in the second half of a 66-42 loss to SMU.

When’s the last time you saw a college football coach get thrown out of a game for two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties? Then again, when is the last time you saw a program get close to the pinnacle of the sport and then completely retreat to a level of mediocrity that looks far more permanent than the success they experienced two years ago? Let’s face facts. TCU’s 2022 season was a fluke. Maybe one of the biggest flukes in the history of college football. And now, TCU isn’t even the best program in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, much less the state of Texas, much less the Central time zone, much less the Big 12, much less the country. 

Virginia Tech: In mid-October last season, the Hokies were 2-4 and going nowhere. Brent Pry, the second-year head coach, was trending toward the hot seat. Whit Babcock, the longtime athletics director, was facing criticism for a second consecutive disappointing football hire.

But then the Virginia Tech turned it around, winning five of its last seven games to get to 7-6. Hokie Nation suddenly felt great. With more returning starters than anyone in the ACC, expectations soared. Pry was the toast of the town. The Hokies were back!

Of course, that was before any games were played. And now that we’re a month into the season, we can say definitively that the Hokies are not back. If anything, they’re back to irrelevance. They stink. 

Virginia Tech’s 26-23 loss at home to Rutgers leaves them 2-2 (they lost a season opener to Vanderbilt), and now we have to re-examine last year’s run to a winning record. The Hokies’ finish included wins over Wake Forest, Syracuse, Boston College, Virginia and Tulane. Not exactly Murderers’ Row. Maybe this year’s schedule will turn out to be just as weak, but nobody is going to be fooled. The Hokies have major problems. 

Auburn: The reason you want Hugh Freeze to coach your program is to score points. That’s why you overlook the NCAA violations at Ole Miss, the inappropriate phone calls that got him fired and the general sense of phoniness that has made him college football’s version of Jimmy Swaggart over the last decade. 

It’s not a bad tradeoff, in theory. If you believe the entire sport is a cesspool, then Freeze is worth the bad publicity — as long as he’s winning. 

But in two years at Auburn, the cost-benefit analysis on Freeze has hit a snag. His team doesn’t win. It doesn’t score points. It isn’t entertaining to anyone, unless punting and committing an unusual number of turnovers (14 through four games) is your idea of a good time.  

Auburn’s 24-14 loss to Arkansas, dropping the Tigers to 2-2, should absolutely put Freeze on a short leash. If you’re going to be an offensive guru, you have to do better than 14 points, which is what Auburn managed against the only power conference teams on its schedule thus far in California and Arkansas. 

Freeze version 2.0 just isn’t working in the SEC. And if you want to blame the quarterback position — neither Payton Thorne nor Hank Brown has looked the part — then you have to blame Freeze too. He’s had two years to improve that position, and so far there’s zero promise of a better future.  

Oklahoma: Jackson Arnold was one of the best quarterback recruits in the country, and it was a massive coup in January of 2022 when Brent Venables got the Denton, Texas, native to commit to the Sooners. But recruiting rankings don’t mean guaranteed success at the college level, and the Sooners are going through major growing pains with Arnold.

While the narrative of Tennessee’s 25-15 win in Norman will focus a lot on Vols coach Josh Heupel, who won a national title as Oklahoma’s quarterback in 2000 and was Bob Stoops’ offense coordinator for four years before getting fired, the actual story here is Arnold. 

He completed just 7-of-16 passes for 54 yards, threw an interception and fumbled in the first half when the Sooners were within sniffing distance of the end zone. He got pulled for Michael Hawkins, who wasn’t amazing but looked steadier and more confident in the second half. If Oklahoma had gotten decent quarterback play for 60 minutes, it might have had a chance to upset the Vols. Instead, the Sooners look a step or two below where they need to be in the SEC. The quarterback situation is going to be a key point of contention for Oklahoma in the second half of the season as they evaluate what’s necessary to compete at this level. 

Miserable but not miserable enough

Nebraska: Stop us if you’ve heard this before. The Huskers found a way to lose a game they absolutely should have won. It’s not as devastating this time because Nebraska is clearly on the right track under Matt Rhule, and quarterback Dylan Raiola is an insanely good freshman who should eventually get the Huskers in the College Football Playoff mix. Still, Nebraska missed a 39-yard field goal with 3 minutes remaining and then lost 31-24 in overtime to Illinois. That dropped the Huskers to 17-43 in one-score games since the start of the 2015 season. 

Vanderbilt: No program in the country is as reliably awful in crunch time as the Commodores. Year after year, coach after coach, recruiting class after recruiting class, Vanderbilt’s ability to lose winnable games is as consistent as the sunrise. The Commodores had their chances to register a huge win at Missouri on Saturday, but kicker Brock Taylor missed a 50-yarder with 3:06 remaining for the lead in regulation and a 31-yarder to extend the game to a third overtime as Vanderbilt lost a Missouri, 30-27. And it’s not like Taylor is a bad kicker: He made a 57-yarder earlier in the game but just couldn’t connect when the pressure was on. This is just what happens at Vanderbilt, where head coach Clark Lea is now 2-23 in the SEC.  

Northern Illinois: The Huskies had two weeks to bask in the glory of upsetting Notre Dame on Sept. 7, and they took full advantage of the interview requests and social media cachet that came their way. But the party ended on Saturday when the lost at home to Buffalo, 23-20, in two overtimes. Somehow, Northern Illinois’ defense only gave up 184 yards but lost when Upton Bellenfant — maybe the best name in all of college football — made a 37-yard field goal in overtime for the Bulls. 

Mississippi State: The Bulldogs are headed for their worst season in nearly two decades. Under Sylvester Croom in 2006, Mississippi State finished 3-9 and fired him two years later. That led to a long run of success under Dan Mullen, who raised expectations at one of the most challenging programs in the SEC. Needless to say, Jeff Lebby is going to struggle living up to those expectations. Mississippi State is now 1-3 in Lebby’s first season after a 45-28 shellacking by Florida at home, which came just one week after losing by 24 points to Toledo. To be fair to Lebby, most of Mississippi State’s team hit the transfer portal after last season when Zach Arnott was fired. But it’s now clear this going to be a really painful and long rebuilt.