What Joe Morrison told Mack Brown following South Carolina’s 1988 rout of UNC
Mack Brown’s second stint as North Carolina’s head football coach is beginning just like his first one — with a game against South Carolina.
It was Sept. 3, 1988, and the Tar Heels, coming off a 5-6 season and the end to the Dick Crum era, arrived at Williams-Brice Stadium to face Joe Morrison’s 19th-ranked Gamecocks. The home team, led by Todd Ellis and Harold Green, naturally had its way, whipping UNC by three touchdowns in front of 73,275 fans.
USC went on to go 8-4 and appear in the Liberty Bowl. North Carolina went 1-10, something Morrison all but predicted when he greeted Brown for the post-game handshake.
“They beat us like (31-10),” Brown recalled during a Monday news conference in Chapel Hill, “and after the game, (Morrison) said, ‘You really have a bad team.’ And I said, ‘Thanks, Coach. I was fully aware of that when I got here, but you just reinforced it to me.’
“Hopefully Will won’t tell me the same thing after the game.”
Brown, of course, is back in charge of the Tar Heels over two decades removed from his first run. His re-debut comes 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte against Will Muschamp’s Gamecocks.
South Carolina opened as a 7.5-point favorite.
Brown’s Heels, picked by the media to finish sixth in the seven-team ACC Coastal Division, will start freshman Sam Howell at quarterback.
“They’re always aggressive on defense,” Brown said of USC, “but with a true freshman quarterback, Will’s gonna put a bunch around the line of the scrimmage and blitz him and try to stop the run and hit the quarterback. That’s easy. That’s a no-brainer, and Will’s one of the better defensive coaches in the country. So he gets that.”
Brown is 69-46-1 as UNC’s coach. He first left Chapel Hill for Texas in 1997. It’s with the Longhorns where he eventually hired Muschamp as his defensive coordinator.
“He was actually our head coach in waiting, he did a tremendous job there,” Brown said. “We had a chance to win the national championship while he was there, that’s why we gave him the title. We thought we wanted to keep him and a lot of people were coming after him.
“He’s smart, he’s tough, he’s aggressive, he did a tremendous job for us. And then when he left us, he became the head coach at Florida and he’s done a great job at South Carolina.”
Brown is 1-3 all-time against the Gamecocks, winning the last matchup in 1991. North Carolina hasn’t won a season opener against a team from a Power 5 conference since Brown’s final season. The Heels are 0-11 since a win over Indiana in 1997.
This story was originally published August 26, 2019 at 4:18 PM.
