Mack’s Factor

It’s a tough crowd here at the Longhorn Laugh Stop when you consider the stand-up Mack Brown has done in eight seasons at Texas and what he gets credit for doing.

Really, if you recently dropped in from outer space and had to pick the best college football coach in the last decade, might it be Mack?

Penn State’s Joe Paterno, the 2005 Associated Press national coach of the year, doesn’t make the short list.

Bobby Bowden of Florida State won a national title in 1999 but now seems to be on a Seminole slippery slope.

Bob Stoops, the black hat in Brown’s derby, didn’t start the Oklahoma party till 1999 and went 7-5 his first year.

Brown hasn’t finished 7-5 since 1995 at North Carolina -- and wouldn’t dare do it again.

You can’t count Steve Spurrier because he took that ill-advised NFL detour; Phil Fulmer had Tennessee going for a while but this year turned a top-five preseason ranking into a pratfall.

Larry Coker won a national title at Miami with Butch Davis’ players; Urban Meyer hasn’t stayed in one place long enough to evaluate a recruiting cycle; Nick Saban was posing as a college coach until the right NFL job -- Miami’s -- opened next to a yacht slip.

There is, of course, Pete Carroll of USC, who is on his way to becoming Bud Paul W. “Bear” Bryant Wilkinson.

But if Carroll loses Wednesday he will be leading Brown in national titles only 2-1, and they’re still disputing one of those titles in Baton Rouge, La.

Brown’s numbers are tough to dismiss.

He is 13-0 this year if you count last January’s Rose Bowl win over Michigan.

His winning percentage, .823, tops all coaches in the last decade and he has more wins in that span, 102, than anyone.

Yet, the portrait of Brown is complex. He is, no doubt, a players’ coach, a people person, a public relations master, a sportswriter’s dream.

The persistent rap on Brown, though, was that he could close deals on recruits but not on titles, thus his nickname: “Mr. February.”

Nice guy; desk very organized.

Brown was first-team Fortune 500 as a chief executive, but you could name 10 other coaches you’d want on the sideline in a tie game.

After beating Oklahoma in his first two seasons, Brown lost five straight in the series and his anguished face became the Longhorn logo.

Brown unsteadily navigated through the epoch of Chris Simms or Major Applewhite at quarterback and figured out the answer was Applewhite one series too late in the 2001 Big 12 Conference title game, when a victory over Colorado would have put Texas in the national title game.

Adversity?

“They say it builds character,” Brown recently said. “I’m full of it, boy. I’m full of character. I don’t have any need for a loss again my whole life.”

His career had been a dream except for “yeah, but ... “

* He couldn’t beat Oklahoma when it counted.

* He couldn’t get to a bowl championship series game let alone win one.

* He had never led a team to a conference title.

Then, in one fell football swoop, Brown checked the digs off his docket.

In the last calendar year, Brown won a Rose Bowl, beat Ohio State in Columbus, defeated Oklahoma when it mattered and led Texas to a Big 12 championship.

Former Texas Coach Darrell Royal, who has covered Brown’s back through those guilty-with-an-explanation 10-win seasons, recently posed a question as it relates to Wednesday’s national title game.

“If we win, what is it he hasn’t done?” Royal said of Brown. “Nothing. He’s covered it all.”

People who have marveled at Brown are taking this time to set records straight.

Dick Tomey, the former Arizona coach who spent the 2004 season on the Texas staff before taking over at San Jose State, said of Brown, “He’s one of the greatest leaders I’ve been around.”

Tomey said the label of Brown-as-figurehead is nonsense.

“He’s being shortchanged there,” Tomey said. “He’s very much the heartbeat of the team. They go out and play for him. He’s not some guy in an ivory tower issuing orders.”

What about the Xs and O’s?

“Nobody is brilliant in that area,” Tomey scoffed. “The great genius in coaching is getting the guys to play.”

Watson Brown, the head coach at Alabama Birmingham, doesn’t hesitate when asked to name the biggest misconception about his little brother.

“Well, he can recruit but he can’t coach,” Watson said. “You don’t win games he won at North Carolina and Texas and not be a good coach.”

The truth is Mack Brown has improved the situation behind every door he has entered.

His first team at Tulane, in 1985, was 1-10. His last team was 6-6.

His first team at North Carolina, in 1995, was 1-10. His last team finished 10-1 and No. 4 in the coaches’ poll.

Texas was 4-7 the year before Brown arrived in 1998, and the Longhorns have won nine games or more every season since.

The givens were that Brown could charm the intent letters out of players and commit to memory the names of every high school coach in the state, but it has to be more than that.

As the close-up on his career approaches, though, doubts linger, and there will be story lines suggesting Brown is out of his element against Pete Carroll with a month to prepare.

“I kind of giggle at that,” Watson said. “That’s talk. I can promise you my brother’s team is well-prepared. He won’t let the magnitude of this game bother him. I may be talking out of turn, but I know him.”

In USC’s last three BCS bowls, though, Carroll and staff have beaten three of the game’s top coaches -- Kirk Ferentz (Iowa), Lloyd Carr (Michigan) and Stoops (Oklahoma) -- by a combined 121-50.

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Mack Brown seems more comfortable in his skin.

Maybe it’s that he is 54 now and, in the long arc of a coaching life, he has been there and done that.

“I’ve still got some scars when I look back,” Brown said.

People don’t realize how hard Brown worked to get to this pinnacle and, despite his pleasantness and congeniality, how seriously he pursued his destiny.

“Public perceptions are tough things because they’re not always real,” Brown said.

All his life Brown was trying to get to a better place.

He and Watson were raised in Cookeville, Tenn., the sons and grandsons of football coaches and administrators.

Mack remembers riveting his eyes to the television in 1969 when No. 1 Texas played No. 2 Arkansas in what some called “the Game of the Century.”

Texas won, 15-14.

“Some people have asked, ‘When did you think you might play for a national championship, or coach for a national championship?’ ” Brown said. “When you’re raised as a small-town boy in Cookeville, Tenn., and football was your life and your family, you thought your whole life about winning it.”

After an injury cut short his playing career as a running back at Florida State, Brown set out on course: student coach at Florida State, receiver coach at Southern Mississippi, Memphis State and Iowa State, offensive coordinator at Iowa State, quarterback coach at Louisiana State and head coach at Appalachian State.

Brown spent one season as Barry Switzer’s offensive coordinator at Oklahoma in 1984 before becoming a head coach for good, starting at Tulane 21 years ago.

His break came in 1997, when he parlayed his second straight 10-win season at North Carolina into one of the plum jobs in college football: Texas.

The position cut both ways, as Brown discovered when three straight nine-win seasons in Austin went down like aspirin without water. No one worked a state harder than Brown, but the pressure eventually showed in his shoulders.

Going 9-5 in 1999 and finishing No. 21 in the AP poll was not the way to establish a long-term relationship.

His 2001 squad, undercut by the Simms-vs.-Applewhite debate, had a chance to play for the national title but lost to Colorado in the Big 12 title game.

“I’ve always had this thing,” Brown confessed. “I want to be perfect. I want to be perfect for all these people who hired me. I never wanted to have a glitch. I never wanted us to lose a game -- all these things that are so unrealistic.”

Then, a few years ago -- “I don’t know why, or how, or what day or month” -- Brown said he had an epiphany.

He told himself that suffering through 10-win years was no way to grow old.

He realized, as a coach, all he could do was put the best team and staff together that he could and roll out the oblong ball.

He was influenced by the childlike enthusiasm Carroll brought to the USC program.

“I started talking to older coaches and I’d say, ‘If you had it back what would you do different?’ ” Brown said. “And they’d say, ‘I’d enjoy it more.’ I fought it too much. And things have worked better since I came to that realization.”

The agonies against Oklahoma eventually added up to five -- but the losing stopped after a hard-fought, 12-0 defeat to the Sooners in the fifth game last season.

Texas has since won 19 straight games. Brown has become more socially connected to his players -- downloading hip-hop music into his iPod and grooving like Gene Wilder did with that boom box to his ear in the movie “Silver Streak.”

Brown is living in the “now” instead of the “what might have been” and says he’ll enjoy the personal honors when “I get through and I’m gumming my food.”

Funny, but things started to click when Brown let his hair down.

Texas won a huge game at Ohio State in September and it was as if the whole program exhaled.

After Texas dismantled Oklahoma, 45-12, on Oct. 8, defensive tackle Rod Wright looked over at a beaming Brown and said, “It’s just great to see the smile on his face.”

After Brown cinched his first conference title in 22 seasons as a head coach with a 70-3 win over Colorado in the Big 12 title game, an emotional quarterback Vince Young said he “loved” playing for Brown and that “everybody feels the same.”

The coaching business, though, sits on a precarious limb, and much of the equity Brown has banked could be lost Wednesday if USC does to Texas what it did last year to Oklahoma.

That won’t change some things.

“I’m proud of him,” Watson Brown said of his brother. “I don’t think he’s gotten the credit at Texas that he deserves. But it all comes out. ... Now he’s got the shot we all would like to have in this business: One shot to win it all.”

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Brownie Points

Mack Brown’s head coaching record:

*--* APPALACHIAN STATE Year Record Bowl 1983 6-5 TULANE Year Record Bowl 1985 1-10 1986 4-7 1997 6-6 Independence Total 11-23 (.323) NORTH CAROLINA Year Record Bowl 1988 1-10 1989 1-10 1990 6-4-1 1991 7-4 1992 9-3 Peach 1993 10-3 Gator 1994 8-4 Sun 1995 7-5 Carquest 1996 10-2 Gator 1997 10-1 Gator Total 69-46-1 (.600) TEXAS Year Record Bowl 1998 9-3 Cotton 1999 9-5 Cotton 2000 9-3 Holiday 2001 11-2 Holiday 2002 11-2 Cotton 2003 10-3 Holiday 2004 11-1 Rose 2005 12-0 Rose Total 82-19 (.812) Totals 168-93-1 (.641)

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