Mack Brown a man of his word as Tar Heels deliver fourth-quarter comeback

CHARLOTTE — Mack Brown’s voice cracked and his eyes welled up as he spoke with ESPN’s Allison Williams, overcome with the emotions of pride in his team and the long road it took to bring it to this point.

Nine months ago, he returned to Chapel Hill, hailed as a savior for the North Carolina football program for the second time.

First, he told the Tar Heels they’d get a sparkling new locker room, revamped nutrition program and best-in-class turf field in Kenan Stadium — all of which arrived on time.

On Saturday, he delivered a football team he promised, too — one with the kind of toughness to battle back against the type of adversity that has caused the Tar Heels to wilt in recent seasons, flipping the old, familiar script as Carolina rallied to top South Carolina 24-20 at Bank of America Stadium.

“I did get a little emotional with Allison afterwards because everything we’ve told these kids that would happen, happened,” Brown said. “Those kids were so happy and my life and Sally’s life is better when we get to see happy kids. The process we’ve done, the people we’ve brought in gave them opportunities to be happy and I just, that’s the best thing in the world to see them do that.”

Every day since February, he said, he and the coaching staff have drilled home the importance of finishing strong, going to the point of stopping practices to declare the “fourth quarter.”

That was apparent on Saturday, because trailing 20-9 late in the third quarter, the Tar Heels raised their game beyond anything they’d shown all day.

“We just kept telling the kids, ‘You’ve got to believe,’ and every time adversity hits we told them to get more positive, to get more animated,” Brown said. “They’ve had a lot of things happen bad in their careers in the past two years and we just told them, ‘This is new, this is different.’”

Instead of the sense of impending doom that had infected the Carolina sidelines over the past two seasons, there was a new emotion.

“Most certainly,” senior left tackle Charlie Heck said. “We had a belief we were going to win the game and we kept pushing and overcoming and we were victorious.”

It started with Antonio Williams grinding out 51 yards on a 98-yard scoring drive, capped by a juggling touchdown catch by Dyami Brown, the first signs that the Carolina coaches were ready to bet on freshman quarterback Sam Howell in crunch time.

After another solid defensive effort from a unit that overcame poor tackling early, offensive coordinator Phil Longo fully cut Howell loose to air it out, as he completed passes of 31 and 23 yards to Dazz Newsome before putting up a 50/50 ball that Beau Corrales hauled in for a 17-yard touchdown to put Carolina ahead for good with 8:26 to play.

Obviously, that confidence Brown preaches is contagious.

“I have faith in those guys,” Howell said. “You guys say 50/50 balls, it’s really 80/20. If they’ve got a little bit of space, I’m going to give the ball to them and let them make a play and that’s what they did.”

Of course, Carolina had been there plenty in recent seasons, and you don’t have to go far to find examples, having led both N.C. State and Virginia Tech with fewer than 10 minutes remaining last season, only to give it away in excruciating fashion.

This time around, Heck said, there were conversations on the sideline in the fourth quarter about focus, about taking care of the details and not making mistakes.

Perhaps most importantly, the Tar Heels believed in the work they’d done since Brown arrived — the new emphasis on finishing strong and the adjustments strength coach Brian Hess made in their offseason program.

Not only did that work give them the endurance to finish, but it gave them a new edge.

“Everybody is conditioned, but it’s how we do it and it’s believing in what we did and I feel like as a team, we believed in ourselves to get the job done,” Carter said. “I think it was more confidence in ourselves to get the job done, because we know the work we’ve put in it and we know what it means to each other to win the game.”

From 5-18 over the past two seasons to delivering Carolina’s first victory over a Power Five opponent in a season-opener, the Tar Heels took another step on Saturday that Brown promised they would make if they believed in the old coach one more time.

So far, he’s a man of his word.

“It was something we’ve talked about all camp,” junior safety Myles Wolfolk said. “We stressed fourth quarter, we stressed turning up in the fourth quarter and making sure our energy is the same, if not better, than it was in the first. that’s something we stressed in camp, and we went out there and did it.

“That was a feeling that I’ve never felt before and that was amazing. All that hard work, all that sweat, all that blood with my brothers, it was amazing to be in that locker room.”

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