Mack Brown and his new coaching staff at Appalachian State University set the third week of January 1983 as their first big recruiting weekend after Brown officially began work in Boone just after the first of the year. They got about a dozen recruits safely ensconced in the opulent Broyhill Inn on the top of a crest overlooking the campus on Friday night and were ready for a full slate of tours, flesh-pressing and wooing the 17-year-olds on the idea of playing football for the Mountaineers.
They woke up Saturday morning to a foot of snow.
"Some of us came from Iowa, where it snowed all the time," remembers Sparky Woods, the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. "But we thought we were moving south. And here nobody's ready for a foot of snow. Fortunately, some of the administrators had four-wheel drives, so we made the best of it we could."
One after the other, the prospects told Brown, "Coach, I can't do this. It's freezing."
Brown's prize target was a running back from Reidsville who most schools were recruiting as a fullback. Brown wanted John Settle as a tailback.
"Coach, I've always wanted to play in the snow," Settle said. "I think that would be so cool."
"Thank you, God," Brown thought to himself.
Mack Brown at Appalachian State in 1983
Nearly 40 years later, Brown thinks Settle might have been the only recruit the Mountaineers landed from that weekend. But what a big one, as Settle went on to rush for 4,409 yards over four years in Boone, play six years in the NFL and make a career out of coaching running backs in the NFL, Big Ten and SEC.
And thus the first domino in Brown's head coaching career fell to be followed by Tulane (1985-87), Carolina (1988-97), Texas (1998-2013) and back to Carolina again in 2019. He was 31 years old in December 1982 when App State Athletic Director Jim Garner plucked him off the staff at LSU, and it was two years too late in Brown's mind to land a head coaching gig. Growing up in Cookeville, Tenn., Brown admired Bill Battle for landing the head job at Tennessee in 1970 and Steve Sloan at Vanderbilt in 1973 when each was just 29.
"With my level of having no patience, I was really disappointed I was not a head coach by the age of 30 because of those two," Brown says. "I admired them so much, and that was exactly the reason I wanted to be a head coach by the time I was 30."
Brown was the offensive coordinator on Jerry Stovall's staff at LSU in 1982, and the Tigers were 8-2-1 and preparing to meet Nebraska in the Orange Bowl when East Tennessee State was looking to replace Jack Carlisle as head coach and App State had just fired Mike Working. He booked a flight to Johnson City and scheduled interviews in Johnson City and Boone as the Tigers wrapped up bowl preparations in Baton Rouge and prepared to leave for a week in Miami.
"Jim Garner picked me up in Johnson City and drove me over to Boone," Brown remembers. "It was nighttime but I could still see some lights way up in the sky. I asked him, 'What's that? A plane?' He said, 'No, those are houses. They build them way up in the mountains here.'
"That's when I fell in love with the mountains. I grew up in the rolling hills. But this was different. I'd never seen mountains that big. I thought it was the coolest thing. I'd always loved lakes and rivers. They had it all up there." Mack Brown, Hugh Morton and Woody Durham
The next summer, Brown was invited as the App State coach to the annual summer outing that Hugh Morton, the developer of the Grandfather Mountain tourist attraction in Linville, hosted for ACC football and basketball coaches, school administrators, media and friends of the conference. Morton had a home in a small, private development around Grandfather Lake and had an evening function there.
"We're sitting on his porch overlooking this beautiful lake," Brown says. "I'm making $38,500 as head coach at Appalachian and I said, 'Mr. Morton, one day I'm going to make enough money to have a house on this lake.' They laughed at me, which was fine. That was fair.
"But he remembered what I said. About 10 years later, I was now the head coach at Carolina. He called me and said, 'Bud, there's a lot open. It won't last long.'"
Brown pounced. He and his wife Sally built a home there, and their Linville life has provided a touchstone no matter if their primary residence was Chapel Hill or Austin or Brown's employer was UNC, the University of Texas or ESPN.
"I love Appalachian State and I love the mountains of North Carolina and all they stand for," Brown says. "They were home for six months a year when I was out of coaching. Sally and I absolutely love it there, and when we finish that's where we'll be."
Mack Brown and Eric Church in 2019
Brown's coaching hiatus from 2014 through 2018 gave him more time to devote to community service and various philanthropic interests, one of them the Mack, Jack & McConaughey weekend of entertainment, golf and socializing held each April in Austin that since 2013 has given over $30 million to charitable organizations. The list of celebrity entertainers in 2016 included Eric Church, the native of Granite Falls, N.C., who grew up as a rabid Carolina football and basketball fan. Church was 13 years old in 1990 when Brown's teams started winning and ripped off a streak of eight winning seasons and six bowl appearances.
"I was in the sweet spot of being an impressionable kid," Church says. "Natrone Means was my favorite player. That's when I became obsessed with it. If we lost to N.C. State, I wanted to call in sick and not go to school. Those were some really good football years."
By the time Brown had left for Texas in 1998, Church was working toward his degree in marketing at App State (he graduated in 2000) and playing his guitar and singing in bars five nights a week around Boone. He remembers writing papers at the 24-hour Waffle House in Lenoir after an evening crooning Jimmy Buffett covers and handing in papers with ketchup and hash brown stains on them. After graduation, he went to Nashville, paid his dues for several years and was signed to a contract with Capital Records in 2005. His 2011 album Chief was named Country Music Association's album of the year, and Church exploded in 2012 as one of country music's hot new stars with his crossover mix of country and rock and his trademark look of the ball cap and sunglasses.
And he had a question for Brown when they were introduced in 2016.
"Why did you leave?" Church asked.
"Excuse me, leave where?" Brown answered.
"North Carolina. I'm a huge fan, you just left."
"I thought, 'Hmmm, what's this all about?'" Brown says.
That exchange led to the common ground of both men sharing a deep affection for Carolina, summer homes in the High Country, the love of golf and outdoor pursuits and of good music. Brown played guitar in a high school band and says over the years on late-night recruiting trips he'd turn the car radio up and sing to himself to stay awake.
"A musician's life is a lot like a coach," Brown says. "They're never home, they're staying up late, they have to please people and they have to perform and be good every night."
For three summers from 2016 to 2018, Church and Brown played a lot of golf at Linville Golf Club, Elk River and Diamond Creek, and the Church and Brown families shared frequent meals. They became close friends.
"You have a lot of conversations on the golf course," Church says. "You could tell Mack really missed the game of football, there was a lot of fire still there. You could see he was a little bit bored and something was missing in his life. You could tell that it was a blessing and a curse to be around the game for ESPN. He enjoyed being connected to the game, he enjoyed seeing old friends and learning about the evolution of the game. At the same time, it was hard to go and do those games and not have any skin in the outcome. You could really feel that void.
"As fate would have it, things started to get a little interesting at Carolina at that time."
Indeed, Brown was hired in late November 2018 to take over the Tar Heel program that had won only five games over two years. One of the first decorations for his office was displaying a Carolina blue guitar signed by Church to go along with guitars from the likes of Willie Nelson, George Strait, Miranda Lambert and Kenny Chesney. Church was on the sidelines for Brown's first two games—at Charlotte to beat South Carolina and in Kenan Stadium to beat Miami. Church's hit song Carolina was played on the Kenan Stadium sound system pre-game and between the third and fourth quarters.
"Sometimes on the golf course, Mack would give his partner a pep talk, two-down, two-to-go kind of thing," Church says. "He'd pull out a story about Texas down at halftime to Oklahoma and pulling it out. Those competitive fires never left. It's been fun to see him channeling that energy back into coaching."
Brown's time in Linville has been curtailed over the last three years by the demands of coaching, navigating the Covid-19 waters and the ever expanding recruiting calendar that opens coaches up to hosting high school prospects during times that used to be sanctioned off for vacation. His mountain life comes full circle on Saturday when he leads his Tar Heels into Kidd Brewer Stadium at App State for a noon kick-off.
It's the Tar Heels' first-ever game in Boone. Lower-level, 50 yard-line seats in Kidd Brewer Stadium are going for $400 each on Stubhub, and App State officials anticipate a record crowd to break the previous mark of 35,000-plus for the Wake Forest game in 2017. Odds-makers label the game a toss-up, but Brown looks to the Mountaineer tradition of having won three FCS national titles, a nearly 80 percent win percentage since 2015 and their victory over the Tar Heels in Kenan Stadium in 2019 and says it's the Tar Heels who are underdogs. He and Sparky Woods, who succeeded him for five years from 1984-88 and parlayed that success into the head coaching job at South Carolina, take a measure of pride in having helped establish what is now a four-decade tradition of winning football in Boone, the success ramping into high gear during the 1989-2012 run of coach Jerry Moore.
"They are in such a better place, I'm so proud of them evolving into one of the best programs in the country," Brown says. "Football is really important there. I am proud of who they've become. They are an older and more experienced program, they are ahead of where we are. Now we're the program that has got to get back to 10 wins a year."
Woods' teams won back-to-back Southern Conference titles in 1986-87, and he remembers applications to the university popping dramatically as a result of the juice around a successful athletic program.
"That's what football does," says Woods, who's been on Brown's staff as a senior advisor since Brown's return to Chapel Hill. "It creates interest in where kids want to go to school and why. We saw it grow. It's so impressive what they've continued to do through the years. I can tell you the coaches when we were there never dreamed of the University of North Carolina coming to Boone."
Church has concerts this weekend in Texas and cannot attend the game. Ironically, his shows Thursday and Friday in New Braunfels are make-up events for the concert he canceled in April to attend the Tar Heels' collision with Duke in New Orleans. He says it's probably just as well given his split loyalties.
As he sings in the hit song Country Music Jesus, "There'll be a fire on a mountain, there'll be a rival and bangin' drums, there'll be screamin and there'll be shoutin' …. "
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace enters his 33rd year writing features on the Carolina football program under the "Extra Points" banner. He is the author of "Football in a Forest" and reports from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network broadcasts. Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com
