UNC’s Mack Brown on College Football’s Current Model: ‘We’re the NFL’

In his 50 years in the profession, Mack Brown has never coached in a professional football league.

But he now believes he may not have to leave the college ranks to get there.

“We’re the NFL. We’re the mini-NFL,” says the 71-year-old Brown, the oldest active FBS head coach who enters his fifth season of his second stint at North Carolina. “It’s just like the NFL. That’s where we are headed. We will never see amateurism again. It’s gone. I hate it. I thought that’s who we are, what college football is.

“Now, we are a farm league for the NFL with many NFL programs. We are headed toward an NFL model.”

Seated in his Tar Heel–blue splashed office, cross-legged and smiling, Brown spoke freely about pretty much anything in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated. He’s of an age where he is unafraid of consequences and repercussions, open and honest. “I’m at a different point in my life than most coaches,” he says.

Brown will turn 72 in August, two months before Alabama’s Nick Saban, the second-oldest coach presiding over an FBS program. And like Saban, Brown is frustrated by the current state of college athletics, where school donors are using name, image and likeness (NIL) to usher in what he and so many others believe is an unsustainable “pay-for-play” model that is supposed to be against NCAA rules.

Mack Brown is entering his fifth season of his second stint as coach at North Carolina.

Rob Kinnan/USA TODAY Sports

“Cheaters cheat. People who used to give inducements are still doing that. It’s just called NIL,” Brown says. “This stupid thing about it’s not pay-for-play. Why are they paying them? They’re not paying them for nothing. It is what it is. I wish we would stop hiding behind NIL.”

While begrudgingly acknowledging amateurism in college athletics is gone, Brown believes it is time for NCAA Division I to divide, for athletes to be compensated as part of a regulated system featuring a “salary cap,” and for college football to operate under a supervisor or commissioner, working within the structure of the College Football Playoff. Different regulations would apply to each of these new divisions: the Power 5, Group of 5 and FCS. The divisions would be an attempt to group more like-minded schools and conferences along revenue-generating lines. This is not a new idea but one rarely expressed publicly by someone of Brown’s stature.

“We’ve all got to get together. I wish our leadership would be more of a group,” he says. “We’ve got people making decisions that are making decisions for the whole. You can’t make the same decisions for Division II like you do the Power 5. We’re doing that, and it doesn’t work. Even FCS. Even Group of 5. There’s not as much money. We need to separate divisions.”

The tension over the future governance system and an athlete compensation model is at an all-time high, a breaking point, some might say. These are years-long issues that have the revenue-generating powerhouses of college football—handcuffed, they say, by the smaller schools—squirming to break free.

Take, for instance, an example from Brown. For years, many Power 5 college football programs have wanted to legalize communication transmitters in quarterback helmets, devices that are used in the NFL. The legislative proposal has failed to gain enough support from within the FBS and Division I governance structure.

“I’ve always said you should have the transmitter in the helmet so you can talk to the college quarterback. You need to talk to the pro quarterback; why can’t you talk to the college quarterback?” Brown says. “They say certain schools can’t afford it. If you can’t afford it, that’s fine. Be in another division.”

On NIL, Brown’s main point is that a semiprofessional model already exists at the highest reaches of college football, so why not standardize and regulate it for the sake of competitive equity and drop the facade of NIL? School donors and boosters are, in many ways, funding football teams with donations to NIL collectives.

Brown, like so many, believe it is unsustainable.

“You are asking boosters now for money for a collective, money to pay coaches, money to build facilities, asking them to buy season tickets, asking them to support 28 sports here,” the coach says. “When do they not take your calls anymore? I laugh with ours. I’ve told them that I’m going to call them every now and then just to say hello because every time you see my number, you’re going to think I’m asking for money.”

Brown isn’t alone in viewing NIL as a sort of bridge to a more professionalized model for those at the top of college football and basketball. Stuck in a sort of purgatory between amateurism and professionalism, college athletics seems to be crawling incrementally toward a more regulated compensation framework. Many believe it’s time to get there as soon as possible. If leaders within college athletics don’t make the decision themselves, then an outside entity—the courts, state legislatures—will make the decision for them.

By that time, maybe Brown isn’t sitting in this spacious office overlooking Kenan Memorial Stadium. Or maybe he is.

About a year ago, as his team slumped to a six-win season, Brown heard rumors he planned to retire, many of them from opposing coaches, he claims. A year later, he enters his 35th season as a head coach after a nine-win season and a division championship, and with a team expected to begin 2023 in the top 15.

“I haven’t heard it as much this year about me quitting because we won, and we’ve got a great quarterback coming back,” he says. “Six of the ones saying I was going to quit got fired. So I say they need to start worrying about themselves and quit worrying about me.”

Brown has no plans to retire.

“I’m having fun,” he says, moments removed from hosting a prospect and his parents in his office. “Why would I recruit that kid if I was going to quit? I took my five years off. I played golf and fished, did TV, loved TV. But every time someone would call and offer me a job, in my heart, I’d think, ‘I might need to do this.’ I really feel like I have a purpose again, and my purpose is to help these kids. It’s a powerful feeling when you can sit down and help them.”

In the meantime, absent a new governance structure and more regulated athlete compensation model, Brown says he’s battling one of his most challenging times as a coach—navigating the NIL waters. He believes North Carolina lost five prospects during the 2023 recruiting process over NIL.

While North Carolina does have an NIL collective, the group does not involve itself in NIL matters with prospects, only current athletes, Brown says. In the NCAA’s updated NIL guidelines, the organization has made clear that NIL-related inducements to prospects are against the rules.

“There are five kids this year that asked for money that I think we would have gotten last year that we didn’t,” says Brown, who is paid $5 million a year in salary. “That’s the question: Can we be good enough going by the rules? I think we still can, but it’s harder than it was two years ago.”

Brown suggests his motivation in coaching has evolved from winning championships to developing and molding young people. He speaks about assisting a current player who is fighting through depression. But there is a lingering desire to win a second national title to pair with the one shimmering from a glass trophy case within the office that his wife, Sally, an interior decorator, designed.

A smiling Brown points toward the encased coaches’ trophy from the 2005 title at Texas and says, “Sally left enough room in there so that we can fit another.”