force opponents to pass. Brown is recruiting like you assume Brown would, and he’s talking a big game about winning immediately. But if the Heels win five games and sign a top-20 class, that’s first-year success.

Bill C’s annual preview series of every FBS team in college football continues. Catch up here!

The first time North Carolina hired Brown, he was an up-and-comer. A 36-year-old former Oklahoma offensive coordinator, Brown had just eked out Tulane’s first bowl bid in seven years (and its last for another 11).

Already a high-level recruiter, Brown aced the interview enough to get the call over a hell of a list of candidates: Arizona State head coach John Cooper, Air Force head coach Fisher DeBerry, and Broncos offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, who would respectively win 10-plusgames five times at Ohio State, engineer three ranked finishes at Air Force, and win 170 games and two Super Bowls.

Brown built slowly at UNC. He won two games in his first two years, 13 in his next two, and 16 the two after that. In years nine and 10, he went a combined 20-3, and late in 1997, he made what appeared to be the final move of his career, accepting the Texas job, where he would 158 games in 16 seasons, winning one national title and nearly winning a second.

The second time North Carolina hired Brown, it just sort of happened. After winning just five games in two years, Larry Fedora was fired on November 25, 2018, and within two days UNC had scooped the 67-year-old