College Football 2018: Grading every new Power 5 coaching hire
9. North Carolina Tar Heels
New Coach: Mack Brown
Departed Coach: Larry Fedora
It was pretty easy to see why North Carolina would want to move on from Larry Fedora. Following an up-and-down first three seasons, Fedora broke through in Chapel Hill by leading the Tar Heels to an 11-win season that included a perfect 8-0 mark in the ACC that included a berth in the conference championship game in 2015.
Since then, however, it has been all downhill. They slipped to 8-5 in 2016, before completely bottoming out in 2017 and 2018, winning a combined five games over the two seasons. Fedora was let go after posting an overall mark of 45-43 over his seven seasons with the team.
North Carolina has long been considered a potential sleeping giant in college football, and there would have been no shortage of interested coaches for the position. Instead of shopping around, the Heels moved quickly to hire Mack Brown less than 24-hours after making the Fedora hire official.
Brown has been out-of-coaching the last five years, and he met an unceremonious end to his tenure at Texas in 2013. He was once one of the most highly regarded coaches in the country, finding immense success during his first stint with North Carolina and then becoming a national champion at Texas in 2005.
But the game eventually passed him by, with some unforgivable recruiting misses and an inability to have Texas competitive on a national stage following a BCS Championship loss to Alabama in 2009.
Brown will be 68-years-old by the time the next season starts, and it’s unlikely he has picked up any new tricks that will make his tenure in Chapel Hill any more successful than the end of his time in Austin.
This was the most puzzling move of the coaching carousel, and it’s hard to really find good reasoning for why the move was made, and why it was made so quickly when there was no competition for his services from other programs.