NC’s Four FBS Coaching Dismissals
About Existing Standard, “Next Level”
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
There are seven Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs in North Carolina.
Four of them — Appalachian State, Charlotte, East Carolina and UNC — fired their head coach this season.
In each case, the explanation for the dismissal included either a failure to sustain a long-established standard or an alleged inability to take the program to the “next level.”
In sports, the “next level” is often as elusive as a butterfly on a windy day. You can see it, maybe even touch it briefly, perhaps even gently grasp it for a while. Far more often, though, the butterfly eludes capture, or the next coach stumbles, just as the last coach — and perhaps a parade of those before him — missed the target, too.
UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham, who informed 73-year-old Hall of Fame coach Mack Brown on Nov. 25 that he wouldn’t be invited back for the 2025 season, elaborated on his decision-making process during a conversation with Carolina radio voice Jones Angell that the university released Monday.
“As we’ve said, we’ve been right at the cusp of really great seasons, getting to eight, nine wins. How do we get to 10, 11?” Cunningham said. “Who can get us to that level? What kind of players do we need to get to that level?
“So that’s what we need, somebody that can come in and take us from good to great. How do we compete for championships — ACC and national championships? And I think we can do that. So that’s what we’re looking for.”
There has been an inverse relationship between time and money in college football for a very long time, and it’s become more extreme in recent decades. As the financial pressure on football (an essential revenue-producer at every FBS school) increases, the amount of time any coach is permitted to either sustain a high standard or reach the “next level” decreases.
This phenomenon was highly evident all across North Carolina this year.
Brown, who previously had a 10-year tenure (1988-97) at UNC and a 16-year tenure (1998-2013) at Texas, got only six years this time. Despite leading the Tar Heels to six consecutive bowl invitations, a top-25 season (2020) and an ACC championship game (2022) during that period, he was fired with three seasons remaining on his contract. His second tenure in Chapel Hill ended with a 44-33 ledger.
The other in-state FBS coaches who were fired this season got even less time.
Charlotte fired head coach Biff Poggi (6-16 record) before he had completed his second season with the 49ers. Appalachian State fired head coach Shawn Clark (40-24), a former Mountaineers offensive lineman, after five seasons. East Carolina fired head coach Mike Houston (27-38) after about five and a half seasons.
Unlike UNC, which has a highly profitable men’s basketball program, App State and ECU long have had football-centric athletic departments that depend heavily on ticket sales, fan interest and now Name-Image-Likeness (NIL) money in that sport above all others. Charlotte, which made the very expensive jump into FBS football in 2013, is feeling the intense financial pressure associated with the need to upgrade its relatively tiny football stadium and other gridiron-related facilities and budgets.
At Charlotte, the “next level” for a football coach — at this stage, at least — is simply winning as much as you lose. Through their 12 seasons of existence as an FBS program, the 49ers have had three head coaches, 11 losing seasons and only a single bowl game. In order, Brad Lambert last six seasons, Will Healy almost four, Poggi less than two.
At East Carolina, the “next level” for a football coach — at a minimum — is to make the postseason far more often than you miss it. Houston appeared to be on his way to falling short of a bowl invitation for the fourth time in six years, and that’s just not going to fly in Greenville. Houston’s defensive coordinator, Blake Harrell, had the “interim” part of his head coaching title removed after leading the Pirates on a four-game winning streak after their 3-4 start (and Houston’s midseason dismissal), so his first bowl trip as the man in charge later this month will represent an early step in the right direction for his tenure.
At App State, the gridiron standard is very, very high. Just within the past 20 years, the Mountaineers went from winning three national championships (2005, 2006, 2007) under legendary coach Jerry Moore at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level to making a very smooth transition to the FBS ranks. Over the past decade, the only FBS programs with more victories than the Mountaineers are Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Notre Dame. That’s insanely good company.
Meanwhile, App State has had only three non-winning seasons over the past 31 years, marking an incredible stretch of consistent success. When Clark missed the postseason in two of the past three years, soon after Scott Satterfield (now at Cincinnati) and Eli Drinkwitz (now at Missouri) combined to win or share four straight Sun Belt Conference titles (2016-19), a coaching change in Boone became virtually inevitable.
One highly unusual aspect of UNC’s coaching change, of course, is that Brown ultimately fell short of a Carolina football standard that Brown himself contributed to at least as much as any coach in program history. He is the Tar Heels’ all-time winningest coach on the gridiron, after all.
That’s one reason why so many Carolina fans believe both that Brown should be celebrated for his countless contributions to UNC football and that, nevertheless, the time was right for a coaching change, for a wide range of reasons.
Brown’s successor inevitably will be asked to take UNC football to the “next level.”
Since Brown left Chapel Hill to take the Texas job at the end of the Tar Heels’ sensational 10-1 regular season in 1997, five men — Carl Torbush, John Bunting, Butch Davis, Larry Fedora and Brown himself (Part Two) — have been asked to lift the program onto that next plateau, however defined, on a consistent basis.
All five men ultimately fell short. Since 1997, Carolina has finished in the national Top 25 only twice: #15 under Fedora after an 11-3 season in 2015, then #18 under Brown after an 8-4 campaign in 2020.
Perhaps the next guy finally will be able to catch that elusive butterfly … and maybe even hold onto it for a while this time.
