Brownlow's Mailbag: Being wrong about Mack Brown, Hamilton, mask up promos and more

By Lauren Brownlow, WRALSportsFan columnist/reporter

In what has become an off-season tradition, I've started my Twitter Mailbag where I'll take your questions and do my best to answer them each week — and I'll try to continue it for as long as the sports hiatus lasts. And yes, I mean the COLLEGE sports hiatus.

So let's get to your questions!

What my friend Keith is referencing here is the fact that when UNC got its latest high-profile recruit, I started to get tweets from UNC fans regarding my initial feelings about Mack Brown being hired. I said *during the season itself* and have reiterated during this recruiting cycle — one in which UNC is slated to get its highest-rated class since this sort of thing was tracked, and by a fairly significant margin — that it would seem that I was wrong. I did not think Brown's name itself would translate to recruits today, and I also wondered what the value was in hiring someone who wasn't going to coach very long, especially since the current coach for the team that Keith covers (Louisville) is a North Carolina native and much younger than Brown, Scott Satterfield, was available.

I did say even at the time that both Brown and UNC could certainly improve the situation if he acted as an overseer of sorts, hiring really good coaches and coordinators — especially if the idea was to sort of fix UNC football and its image and where it stands in the national landscape before Brown re-enters retirement. That is exactly what Brown has done so far, and the thought process behind his hire is bearing out what many thought would happen that I didn't think made sense at all at the time. I still thought it would take time to translate, so I wasn't going to "dunk" on anyone if North Carolina hadn't had a great season last year. I thought their schedule was such that getting more than three wins would have been crazy based on the way they'd looked the year before. Coaching transitions take time to work, and so even I was surprised last year when UNC seemed to be a much better-prepared and coached team than the one I'd seen a year ago.

While I genuinely do not care about the outcome of games anymore beyond what storylines benefit our area the most in terms of interest, I was raised a North Carolina fan and I did go to school there, as some will remind me as if I were somehow attempting to hide that fact. Like I'm sure plenty of people who grew up that way in our state, we didn't have the kind of disposable income available for basketball season tickets. So we had football season tickets instead. And growing up a fan of this program does give me some unique insight into what it means to have expectations attached to it.

After waiting what felt like a lifetime for the 1997 top-5 matchup of Florida State at North Carolina and seeing the Tar Heels just look like they weren't even playing the same sport (mostly when UNC was on offense, to be fair), it felt like a referendum. It felt like I could literally hear UNC bumping its head against the ceiling of what its football program could be, and instead of shattering the ceiling, harmlessly falling back down to the floor. From that moment until I genuinely stopped caring whether UNC won or lost beyond what would get readers interested, I never again let myself get excited about ANYTHING regarding the football program. You can read about that game here, and see that my own mother is quoted. We spent that whole day as a family in Chapel Hill and I still remember her telling us to be careful with our tickets and not let the perforation get damaged or else they would be invalid. We still tease her about it.

I will say, UNC winning the Coastal and playing a (surprisingly) close game against Clemson in the ACC title game a few years ago did give me some pause to that thought process that Carolina football had a defined ceiling. But at the end of the day, if you can't recruit at an extremely high level in college football, you're not going to beat the upper-echelon teams. It would certainly appear that at the very least, that part is changing in Chapel Hill — and that's the part that has to change for UNC to genuinely challenge the powers that be.

So honestly, Keith? Having some empathy for those who would allow themselves to have expectations, no, I would not dunk on them. I also wouldn't because I don't think this year is the referendum on Mack's hire necessarily. And I think that unless Carolina has a few disastrous or disappointing seasons and not just this coming one, it wouldn't be a dunk-worthy situation either. No, the dunking would commence really only if things went downhill for a time, the assistants don't stay and/or they're not replaced with enough high-level recruiters (which Dre Bly certainly is, among others) and the hire to replace Brown isn't a good one. That's what got Carolina football into the choppy waters of football meh-ness it found itself in after Brown left and really up until his return, and while it has nearly been able to grab the rope a few times, it hasn't pulled itself fully out of those waters yet. If you combined all of those things with the Scott Satterfield hire working out really well at Louisville? That would be the only scenario where I'd have a clear path to the basket with just one lone defender making the ill-advised choice to stand in my way.

Because unlike the folks attempting to "dunk" on me now, I understand that I'm going to be wrong sometimes and I am fine with that. It would be easy for me to just say "I love this hire!" or "We'll have to wait and see!" every time a school made a move, but that's not really how I operate. If I'm asked for my opinion on something, I'm going to give my opinion. And that was my genuine opinion. I even ADMITTED at the time that it was somewhat colored by my own past history with Brown when I *was* a UNC football fan.

And by the way, the only more UNC football thing that could happen this season than having a 5-7 record in spite of high expectations would be a pandemic canceling the season altogether without a chance to see Sam Howell and company in action. Always wondering what might have been. That is the UNC football experience in a nutshell. I've maintained for awhile that UNC football is the only UNC sport that diehard fans can actually claim to have the same feeling as NC State fans about — in other words, that it is somehow cursed, through a combination of its own actions and the forces of the universe, and that it can make its fans miserable. NC State fans aren't going to have any sympathy for their Tar Heel brethren considering the basketball team, and they shouldn't, but the similarity of the two experiences exists nonetheless.

I know it can be fun to go back to a talking head who had an opinion we thought was foolish at the time when it seems they were wrong about it. I know that it can be fun to be excited about your team. I know that sometimes the two go hand in hand. I don't take it personally. I might make it kind of boring for you, though, because my reply will still basically be, "Yeah, it appears I was wrong about my initial thoughts."

Please understand that I will not end up on a poster for your dunking pleasure, though. I will either foul you or get out of the way.

This is a really interesting question. I ... honestly have no idea. I would assume that they'd have to do it that way. I will say that unless things got really disastrous, I do not see this happening. I could see the NFL getting some sort of special permission to play in another country before I could see them shutting down the season. They're professionals and so the NFL can still actually attempt to play the game a little more safely than colleges are going to be able to do in terms of restricting player/staff movements, although boy oh boy does the NBA plan have a lot of issues. I think that they will attempt to play this season no matter what. They may move some of it, and they've built that into the schedule, but it's going to get played, some way, some how. This is literally the only sport that I feel this way about, save maybe the PGA where at least in theory, transmission between players isn't going to be as prevalent as it will be in some of the contact sports. I also think hockey's plan to play in hub cities in Canada has some promise, so maybe that season as well. As for the rest? Not so sure.

But let's say something ridiculous happens and the season is canceled. I would assume they'd have to have the same draft order they'd have before. The real question would be picks that are contingent upon a season being played in terms of their value. That part would, I assume, be relatively easy to figure out. I just don't see any way that they could change the order if no games were played, or even if just a few were played. I would guess that the picks remain the same and if teams already traded 2021 draft picks, they'd have to honor that.

I would love this so much. In case this moment has gotten too old for some of you:

I love Steve Smith so much. I still have and wear my "Ice Up Son" t-shirt proudly. I remember when this team used to have players that I knew on it. Thank goodness for Christian McCaffrey and Teddy Bridgewater, who I loved long before he was signed by my team. And in fact, in my team's own ability to allow quarterbacks to have nice things, they signed him to replace their franchise quarterback that they cut just a few days into a pandemic. It's almost like they were trying to find a reason to make people dislike one of the most beloved players in the NFL. Maybe it's actually an elaborate thought experiment! I would hope that most Panther fans will understand that none of this is Teddy's fault.

Anyway, I digress. You can read my screed against the Panthers' handling of Newton if you want more of that kind of content.

We're starting to see more and more coaches and players and famous people come out and say this, and even some politicians that were initially reticent to say it. I don't know whether or not it will work. I hope that it will. Mandating masks seems to have helped, but I know everyone hoped we wouldn't get to this point. I certainly hoped that we wouldn't. But it had gotten to the point where I just would not go to the store anymore unless I had to because once the warmer weather hit, people seemed to assume we were all good to go. We are not, in fact, good to go. And college football is in real jeopardy of starting on time or finishing at all at this point.

I've already gone on my mask rant. If you want, you can still read that.

I'd like to go ahead and preempt a point, though, and one that I've seen quite a bit. First of all, even if every single protestor you saw out marching against racial injustice weren't wearing a mask, it would not make it all right for you to not wear one, nor would it for them. However, at least from what I saw, many of them were wearing masks (I'd say a higher percentage than I'd been seeing even at the grocery store in the weeks before the mandate) *and* they were outside. Outdoor transmission of the virus is pretty rare so far, although it's admittedly early in our knowledge of COVID-19 and I would not personally want to be milling about in a mass of people together, masks or not. Indoors, it's more easily spread because it's harder for the virus to dissipate than it is outside. And we are all more susceptible to it because we have no natural immunity to it. So while I'm sure that some people caught COVID from protests, it's likelier that many more caught it indoors in close quarters without masks or outside in super-close quarters without masks, then went on to spread it to others either before they had symptoms or with asymptomatic cases. It's also worth noting that protesting to end racial injustice is a little bit different of a decision than deciding you can't be bothered to wear a mask inside a grocery store for 15 minutes. This should not need to be explained to people.

Anyway, we aren't going to have college football and maybe even college basketball if y'all keep going to indoor spaces without masks on, so please, MASK UP, SON.

I know I'm speaking to a fellow parent here, LK, so I can only tell you that while the answer to this is probably yes, I will not be among that group helping it to crash. Hamilton is wonderful, and I will watch it at some point, but there is a less than zero chance I am staying up until midnight to watch a three-hour musical and go to bed at 3am. I can't find a consensus that indicates the exact time this will be available. But I will say that I am glad my in-laws are coming to town for my son's fourth birthday tomorrow because normally, if Disney+ were to crash, that would be a problem in my house. Of all the streaming services that we have, that's by far the one that my kid is enthralled by the most. We're lucky it was included with our cell service subscription, but if we had to make a move to cut one of the services, it would be the toughest for me to let go of for my kid's sake. It actually works pretty well so far and hasn't had any outages for us, unlike every other service we've used. Hamilton mania will certainly test that, though.