Q & A with Mack Brown, U. of Texas.

AFCA: During your 32 years in college coaching, you have made four stops as a head coach (Appalachian State, Tulane, North Carolina, and now Texas) and transformed all four programs into winners. What are some of your keys to success?

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Mack Brown: They are all four good places to be a head coach. First, all of those schools are very good academically and have really good administrators and care about what is right. Second, they are all in good parts of the country for recruiting. And finally, I have been able to surround myself with really good people.

I have had good bosses wherever I have been and they have allowed me to hire the people that would run our football program the way I wanted it run. Having a great administration and good assistants to work with has been the key to my success at every stop.

AFCA: If you could give a younger coach some advice about becoming a head coach, what would it be?

MB: There would be two pieces of advice. The first one I received from Vince Dooley when he retired from Georgia in 1988. He told me that being a head coach in modern day, you are going to have a crisis. The

trick is not to panic, but to turn the crisis into a positive.

The second piece of advice would be to do what is right. You always make the decision that you feel is the right thing to do. You can sleep at night with that decision because you feel in your heart you made the right decision. Even if your decision wasn't the right way to do it, at the time, you thought you made the best decision.

AFCA: Collegiate head coaches have to deal with a lot of pressure from the administration, fans, or media during this day and age. How do you deal with the pressure you face at Texas?

MB: I like to ask people that I respect about the decision I want to make, and I take that input and make a decision. I do understand people who scrutinize you as a head coach don't know you as a person, so I don't take that stuff personal. Secondly, those people who criticize me don't have all the information I do that led to a decision that I made. I do not worry about outside pressure. Pressure is just a part of being a football coach.

AFCA: It seems year after year, your program usually has one of the best recruiting classes in the country. What are some of the keys to how you recruit?

MB: We have a great institution for athletes to come to. We have a state with 20 million people and some of the best high school coaches in the country. Football is really important to young people in this state. You are supposed to play football when you grow up in the state of Texas. So, the evaluation process is the most important thing that we do in recruiting because they have to be a fit socially, academically, and athletically.

There are so many great athletes to choose from, the only problem that we face in recruiting is that we can't get all of the good players in our state. Conversely, when I was at Tulane, we had to concentrate on numbers and getting as many athletes as we could.

After we built our program at North Carolina, we could get 15 athletes from the state, and then we had to branch out and recruit in other surrounding areas. We have over 1,200 high schools in the state of Texas and there are around 330 in North Carolina, so recruiting in Texas is like recruiting in four different states.

AFCA: What is your philosophy on offense, defense, and how do you run your program as the head coach?

MB: As the head coach, I like to know every aspect of our program and how things are getting done because I am responsible for it. I visit with the offensive and defensive coaches because it is really important to us that we have a staff game plan that fits our whole team.

Some weeks, we may need to run the ball more to keep our defense off the field, or we might need to blitz more on defense because we feel that our opponent has such a great running attack. In that aspect, I am very hands-on with our coaches.

Our offensive philosophy is to be able to throw the ball on every play if we need to, to win the game. Or run the ball as much as possible to win the game. But, we want to have enough of a running and passing attack that we are balanced. We don't like to lock ourselves in on just one aspect of the offense.

Defensively, we want to be sound, but multiple. I like our defense to look complicated, but still be simple for our players to run. We want to stop the running game, put our opponents in long yardage and put a lot of pressure on the quarterback.