Mack Brown slid so easily back into his old job, like shrugging on a rumpled old sweatshirt on a cool fall morning, that it’s easy to forget now, almost four years later, what a tremendous gamble this really was. It’s not that it had never been tried before, but there was an inherent audacity in bringing a coach off a television set and out of retirement back to a school that, all these years later, still never quite got over him leaving the first time.
And if he’d walked off into the sunset at Texas, that might have been one thing. But there was also the way things ended there, as the program seemed to slip from his grasp in the years after he delivered the Longhorns’ long-sought national title.
Still, the way Brown assumed his old position as if he’d never left has been remarkable, a man truly back where he belongs, and his tenure has certainly offered hints of the old magic along the way. There’s so much to like about what Brown has done back in Chapel Hill. At some point, though, there has to be more.
