Brown impressed with Howell, Surratt and running backs; not happy with penalties, his dancing

Mack Brown met with the media for his weekly press conference on Monday morning to discuss Carolina's victory over South Carolina and look ahead to Saturday's home-opener against Miami.

Here are the highlights from the conversation.

Opening statement

Obviously very pleased with the win, we messed up a lot of things. There are so many things we can do better as coaches and try to help the guys put themselves in better positions, but I did feel like the confidence they showed in the fourth quarter is something that we really needed. The comeback in the fourth quarter was something that will really help our football team because it helps them buy into who we are as coaches. We kept telling them, ‘Be in great shape, win the fourth quarter,’ and when you do that in a close ballgame, it reinforces the 10 months we’ve been preparing these guys for that game. I was really excited that we looked like we were in really good conditioning, considering the heat.

You question your offensive line’s toughness when you get here and they did a really good job with the backs that we have, who are tremendous, of running the ball in the fourth quarter. I think that was the difference in the ballgame; the 90-plus yard drives, twice, keeping South Carolina's defense on the field, not allowing their offense to have the ball … all of those things were real positive for us. South Carolina is a good team; I think we’ll see them do well throughout the year.

We won the turnover battle, which is really important. If you win the turnover battle and you win the rushing game, most of the time, you’re going to end up doing well. Way too many penalties; we’ve worked so hard on it every day. We've had ACC officials at every practice, and still, we had too many, so we’ve got to go back and start over in that area and just continue to talk about it and preach.

We had three sacks; we had opportunities for six or seven and missed tackles on the quarterback, so that’s another area we can really improve. We didn’t have that many mental mistakes, so for a first ballgame, I thought the coaches did a great job of making sure we were getting in the right place and doing the right stuff.

After early, where we missed a lot of tackles, I feel like our defense stepped up and did a tremendous job.

Entirely too many mistakes in the kicking game on coverage, which put us in a position where we lost field position by 10 or 15 yards and that really hurt us during the ballgame.

Brown's assessment of Miami

We've got a really strong test with Miami this weekend. Their talent will be more like Clemson than anybody else in this league. They’re very, very talented; they’ve had two weeks to prepare, so they’ll be fresh. They’ll be mad because they lost in a tight one to Florida, so we’ll have our hands full.

The first thing you look at is their defense. They’re an old-timey Miami defense. Maybe the best set of linebackers in the country and if not, they’re in that group. Those two guys are all over the field.

They’ve got really good pass rushers on the edge, they’re so talented from top to bottom. (Trajan) Bandy is one of the top corners I’ve seen.

(Receiver Brevin) Jordan in space, he is so good. Jeff Thomas and K.J. Osborn are three guys that can fly. I got the turf in here for fast teams; I’m hoping it works for us this weekend because they’re really fast.

On whether it was a challenge to turn the page to Miami

Is, not was. We had a victory meal last night; we were really hard on them in the videos, and showed them we won the game, but here are all the things that we did that could have kept us from winning the game as coaches and players.

Brown's assessment of Sam Howell's first start

I thought that Sam did a tremendous job. He’s got so much composure. You walk out there and you get a delay of game on the first play of the game and he didn’t even flinch. I thought Phil did a good job with him when he said, ‘OK, first and 15, here we go.’

He got hit, he made plays with his feet. I think he’s at his best, he’s got such a great touch on the deep ball and the catch by Dyami Brown is one of the best I’ve ever seen … when I got home and turned on ESPN and saw it was the play of the day, what a great catch. That’s not a good catch, that’s a great catch. Then, Beau Corrales to jump up with his height and length on the goal line. Sam’s got really good touch on the deep ball.

I still feel like he’s most impressive when he’s out of the pocket and he’s running toward the line of scrimmage. He’s fast enough to make yards and strong enough to break tackles, but when people come up, he’s got that really good awareness to throw the ball downfield like he did to Antonie Green. He just didn’t have his feet under him enough to get it to him, or that’s a touchdown throw and I think he’ll be so much better this week than he was last week. He has great composure; not much bothers him and the way you all see him is the same way we see him every day. You ask him questions and he just answers them.

Brown's assessment on Chazz Surratt's 12-tackle performance in his debut at linebacker

I looked him up last night at dinner and just hugged his neck and said, ‘you were a quarterback this time last year; you’ve never played in a game at linebacker.’ He played all day, he didn’t get tired, he’s in great shape. I think he’s got a chance to be a tremendous player and I think he actually has a chance, if he progresses, to be a pro linebacker because he runs so fast and he’s 230 pounds. He overran some things early because he was so hyped; you can imagine his head swirling out there on the first series.

I was so impressed by the way he played and how hard he played. He comes probably 10 or 12 yards to his left once and bats a ball down on a curl route that a lot of linebackers can’t get to. He will only get better and better.

This week, we’ve got to figure out with Dominique (Ross), Jeremiah Gemmel and him, who do we put in, how do we rotate them? That’s a good problem to have that we didn’t have last week.

On how the defensive backs handled the loss of Trey Morrison

We’re sitting there and poor Storm Duck, who’s never been in a game is over there and we said, ‘OK Storm, go have fun bud.’ He looks at us like, ‘You’re kidding?’ We said, ‘No, you’ve got it. There’s no choice; you’re a freshman,’ and he played really well.

I was impressed with the play of Greg Ross. He had some tough plays last year and people picked on him some; he made some really good plays Saturday against good players. All of them stepped up with a lot of confidence.

On whether a win allows the staff to coach differently

You can coach them so much harder after a win, especially a team that in its past, has struggled and didn’t have a lot of confidence. We’ll coach them hard tomorrow; it’ll be really hard, it’ll be like we lost and they understand that. I told them, ‘let’s enjoy it, but we could have played so much better.’

On whether Howell took too many hits on Saturday...

The number one thing is he needs to learn how to get down. We’ll show him some Kyler Murray tape. He’s more like Sam Ehlinger at Texas; he wants to run over everybody, he’s tough, but he’s not going to do that, so get down. Get your yardage and slide. Coach Longo will be teaching him to slide today, I’m sure, so that will help some.

On the defensive front...

I was really impressed with the way our front seven stopped the run, especially without Ross. I thought without Ross and John Smith, we had no experience a linebacker and the guys did a good job of holding those guys to, I think, 128 yards rushing… I said I was disappointed, we could have had a lot of sacks that we missed.

On the trio of Tar Heel running backs...

I feel like the running backs are our best group. I’m not sure anybody’s got three that are as good as these three. Robert Gillespie did a masterful job of keeping all of them in the game.

His fresh legs were obvious and he was hard to tackle. Any of those guys can be in the game at any time and the other thing is they took care of the ball. Sam has got to take care of the ball better; he had it on the ground twice. Other than that, we didn’t have a ball on the ground.

On whether the distribution of carries will be similar moving forward...

I think it will change. We’ve got Williams, Williams and Carter, which sounds like a law firm. We used to have Johnson and Johnson, which obviously sounds like something different. With these guys, we want it to be The Firm, we want them all three to carry the ball … all three of them at times were hot. Michael Carter is really good in space; he’s as good as anybody and he’s really fast and he’s tough inside, but you get him on the corner? Our receivers and our tight ends did an outstanding job blocking downfield on our flares and sweeps and such.

If you get as fresh as Antonio and he’s in there, everybody looks slow to him. He just jumped off that goal line and I said, “Whew, that’s good stuff,’ and he did that the whole fourth quarter.

When you’ve got three, it doesn’t matter, because all three of them can do everything that the others can do.

On players who didn't get into the game on Saturday...

What I told the players yesterday in the team meeting is that, ‘If you didn’t play in the game and you thought you were going to, it simply means you haven’t built enough trust in your coach. He wanted to play you, he meant to play you, but when you get right in the middle of the battle of the game, you look over there and say, ‘not yet; I’m not there yet,’ because you’ve got to have to total trust in a player to put them in.

His assessment of Javonte Williams' game

He’s got the unusual ability, he’s got the power of a 220-pound guy, he’s got the speed of anybody, it’s probably 4.4 and he’s got really good hands and he’s a good ball security guy. I think he’s a big-time player and he looked like it. If you get him on that flare pass with blockers out in front of him, I wouldn’t want to tackle him, coming downhill. He’s a really good player.

On why Brian Anderson replaced Nick Polino at center for a period late in the game...

We’re trying really hard to develop depth because these are long seasons, now; 12 games is a long time, then hopefully, you’ve got some more. We’re trying to get that White group to be good enough that it doesn’t matter; just put them in and put them in any time you want. Hopefully we’ll get to a point at some time where we’d put them all in.

We trust our guys. Stacy (Searels) said Nick was worn down a little bit, because he’d never played center. He’s got that monster over him every play, so it was just to get some fresh legs in the game late.

On South Carolina's third quarter touchdown...

Myles was over trying to get the young ones lined up, and he just didn’t quite get back in time. It looked like a bust, but it wasn’t; he was coaching. They snapped the ball before he could get back over in the middle. That’s why I was so proud of these guys, that nobody is pointing fingers when they throw the touchdown pass. We explain exactly what happened and we move on.

His assessment of the starting safeties

Really proud of the two safeties. Myles Dorn and Myles Wolfolk played so well. Myles Dorn missed some tackles early and they were in space against really good players, so we’ve got to slow him down a little bit. He was too excited.

On why he danced, what he thought of it on film and where the inspiration came from

I wanted to come back to have fun and I want the kids to have fun. The dance that I did is pretty embarrassing. I didn’t know there would be video of it, either. Trying to find it all and buy my way out of it, but I think it’s too far out there.

We were telling our stories in the team meetings. Two players per team meeting, a staff member or a coach would get up and tell their life story and it was really emotional to see what some of these guys have been through. Everybody would talk about their hardships and who they most admired during their lives and also, because we were so excited when we’d have meetings and you’ve got them at 6:30 in the morning, we started a dance contest.

One morning, they started, ‘Mack, Mack,’ and I said, ‘No; I’m the boss, I’m not dancing.’ They said, ‘come on coach, you need to dance for us.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t dance.’ Then, I made a real mistake in my life, I said, ‘Beat South Carolina, then I’ll dance.’

As I’m walking in the dressing room they could have cared less about anything else than, ‘Dance, dance.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ Needless to say, that was the first time I’d thought about that since I made my promise. Next time I may cut my hair or something; I’m not going to dance.

I would call them very awkward. I don’t dance and I’ve never thought about it, so all I did was what I’ve seen the kids do in their dances. I tried to do a few of those things and that was it, and by the way, there wasn’t music, so it really wasn’t fair.

I think there were 600-700 text messages on Saturday night and all of them said, ‘Great win, hmmm, don’t know about the dancing.’

On what it means to overcome some of Carolina's recent demons in winning the way it did

We couldn’t have scripted it any better. They’ve lost enough games late like that over just stuff. Our coaches didn’t panic, our players didn’t panic and I thought we couldn’t have scripted it any better. It was the perfect way to finish; ‘Just do your job, don’t look at the scoreboard, don’t worry about it.’

We had some things in around the goal line and we didn’t execute them very well so it looked way too conservative. Phil opened it up with him, late second quarter, second half. It was just a process of the first time all of us have been on the field together.

There’s nothing better for your confidence than to have a tough game that you mess things up and still win. It shows them you don’t have to play perfect in college football; it’s not a perfect game. You’ve got young people that make mistakes and the ones that make the fewer mistakes win the game.

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