By Lee Pace, GoHeels.com

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Mack Brown has returned to Chapel Hill three times in 2015, first for a wedding, then for a memorial service for Dean Smith and just this weekend for football purposes—a more leisurely trip that included a talk at Carolina's high school coaches clinic Friday evening and watching the Tar Heels' practice on Saturday morning. Included in the visit was lunch with former coaching aides Darrell Moody and Kenny Browning and a half hour's worth of kibitzing with former players Corey Holliday and Rick Steinbacher (of the UNC athletics staff), Mike Morton (a Kannapolis dentist and rising college football zebra) and Sean Crocker, the head coach at nearby Panther Creek High.

He took note of new things—the Loudermilk Center on ground that once housed his office and the enormity of development east of campus on Hwy. 54. And he saw some old things as well—including the BP station he stopped at for gas in 1989 and was told in no uncertain terms by a clueless attendant that Carolina would never be any good in football “as long as that Mack Brown guy is coaching.”

“I drove past it again just like I did for ten years,” Brown said.

Brown proved that guy wrong by building a juggernaut at Carolina (six straight bowls from 1992-97 and back-to-back top 10 finishes in 1996-97) and then another at Texas, climaxed by the 2005 national championship and a shot at it again in 2009. Now Brown has exchanged his coaching whistle for an ESPN microphone and a PDA that he uses to dispatch social media posts at rapid speed and remain in text message contact with the Who's Who of college football.

He'll speak of missing the competition and camaraderie of coaching but enjoying the life as a TV analyst. “All I had to do was learn to give opinions and turn a 30-minute story into 15 seconds,” he says. He likes the schedule—hard work from late August until early January and then time to go on a stretch like he's doing this spring, leaving Chapel Hill and visiting a daughter in Virginia and then on to see coaching friends at Kansas State, Notre Dame, Nebraska and West Point.

“I'm helping people I like, that's fun for me,” Brown says. “I'm at a really good place in life.”

Brown talked for 100 minutes Friday night to a high school clinic, regaling them with snippets of wisdom and anecdotes from four decades of coaching. Standing in the Blue Zone at the east end of Kenan Stadium, he gazed out on the field and told of his first year at Carolina in 1988 and drew on a quote from President John Kennedy about good leaders having the ability to exude “poise under pressure.”

The Tar Heels were 0-6 that fall and hosting Georgia Tech, 2-4 in coach Bobby Ross's second season in Atlanta, this Ross's second stint in the ACC after having won three straight ACC titles at Maryland earlier in the decade. Brown and Ross were visiting at midfield before the game.

“This could likely be the worst football game in the history of the sport,” Ross said to Brown.

“I hear you,” Brown said (Carolina would win 21-17 for its only victory of the year and Tech would finish 3-8, two years before winning the national championship). Brown then asked Ross, 15 years his senior, for advice on keeping all hands on deck amid what could look to the outside to be a sinking ship.

“I asked him, 'How do you do this, how do put up with losing?'” Brown said. “He said you just keep believing that every single day you're going to do some little something that's going to get you over the top. You've got to convince everyone that's watching you that it's okay. You do this [makes a pouting face] they're all going to do it too. If you look like you're giving up, they're going to give up. They're watching everything you do.”

Brown looked around the room and noted that two players from that era were present

—Holliday, an associate AD at Carolina, and Pat Crowley, now the head coach at Winston-Salem Reynolds High.

“During those 2-20 years, Pat and Corey and everyone was looking at me to see if I was ready to kill myself,” Brown said. “At home I wasn't doing very good. But in front of these guys I was going to let them know it was coming, we were really close. I put it up on my wall—'It is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.' We're going to make it.”

He told of his year as offensive coordinator at Oklahoma in 1984 and verbally assaulting his unit and a red-shirt freshman quarterback named Troy Aikman halftime of a road game against a lousy Kansas team and then watching his team slink to the very level he'd accused them of falling to. “Those kids look up to you,” head coach Barry Switzer told him on the plane ride home afterward. “They played down to the level you put them at.”

“I never forgot that,” Brown said. “That's message to everyone in this room.”

He spoke of the challenges of both jobs at Carolina and Texas at the beginning of his tenures of uniting all the constituencies—students, faculty, administration, trustees, returning players, recruits, wealthy alumni, blue-collar fans, high school coaches, former lettermen.

“I asked Darrell Royal when I first got there, 'Why isn't Texas winning?'” Brown related. “He said it was because all of the BBs were all over the floor. It's your job to get them all back in the box. It's hard to get them all in the box and hard to keep them there after you do.”

Brown told the coaches of stumbling upon The Jerry Springer Show for the first time ever in his hotel room the night before the national championship game against USC and finding a way to work Springer into his pre-game talk, drawing a voluminous laugh from his team and telling them, “All right, let's go have fun. That's why we're here.”

And he cautioned the audience of the dangers of letting a season be defined by a couple of isolated losses and losing sight of the big picture.

“I got so I wasn't happy at 12-1 like I wasn't happy here at 1-10,” he said of his first two years at Carolina in 1988-89. “That's really stupid. If you're not careful, you become only about winning instead of about coaching. And that's why we all got in the business in the first place.”

Brown has had a connection with Tar Heel coach Larry Fedora for about a decade now, Fedora reaching out to Brown for coaching career advice and insight when Fedora was offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State. Brown gave Fedora some counsel upon Fedora being courted in 2011 and references on current staff members Larry Porter and Gene Chizik.

Saturday Brown was tapping into his PDA the names of Tar Heels to watch when he gets back onto the set of ESPN next August. He marvels at what Fedora & Co. have done on offense over three years and notes that the one missing piece is getting the defense squared away.

“I'm excited to see what's going on here,” Brown said. “I'm very proud of what Larry's doing. He's got a lot of things going in the right direction. I love the coaches he's hired on defense. Gene Chizik helped us win a national championship at Texas, and he's surrounded himself with some very good coaches. Larry Porter is one of the best in the business. I'm excited about the future here.”

With that, Brown exchanged a few more laughs with the guys about the player who was terrified to get on a plane to Clemson in 1992 and the infamous running regimen of former strength coach Rich Tuten. He turned serious a moment to say he'd watched in shock at the unfolding of the academic scandal at Carolina and had commiserated with a number of former Tar Heels “who worked their tails off for their degrees and were proud of them.”

Brown left the scrimmage a few minutes before it ended, on to the next stop with his wife Sally to visit grandkids in Charlottesville. He walked off Navy Field and it wasn't even close to sunset.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (leepace7@gmail.com) in his 25th year writing “Extra Points” and 11th reporting from the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network. His unique look at Tar Heel football appear regularly throughout the year. Follow him on Twitter @LeePaceTweet.