ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL KICKOFF

July 21, 2022

Mack Brown

British Brooks

Josh Downs

Cederic Gray

North Carolina Tar Heels

Press Conference

Q. So much has changed since 1989, wouldn't you agree? In 2020 you lost a lot of dynamic play makers, and, yet, your offense last year was one of the best in the league in spite of the fact that you gave up 45 sacks leading the league for the second consecutive year. Once again, you have Josh Downs back, but you have lost some talented players. What are your expectations for the offense?

MACK BROWN: The expectation for the offense is to be the best in the country. We have to shore up sacks. We had too many tackles for loss. We've changed some things with our scheme. That should help our offensive linemen. We lost four offensive linemen. We lost a tailback. We lost some great receivers, but we've got a very, very talented but inexperienced team coming back, so that starts at quarterback. We have two quarterbacks in Jacolby Criswell. He was the Gatorade Player of the Year in Arkansas. We have Drake Maye, who was the Gatorade Player of the Year in the state of North Carolina, that's been there for a year. Those guys have both played and practiced a lot. We've started Sam Howell when he didn't have any experience the year before, so we're really, really excited about our offense, and we think we have a chance to be good.

It's interesting that today is about hype. It's about hope for all of us. Real football starts for us in a week, and then by about midseason there's about 75% of the ones that are hyped today that aren't playing well. So we were one of those last year.

We're excited. Understanding we have a lot of question marks, and we have a lot of things we have to get fixed, but that's what coaches do, and that's what players do, and the offseason has been good.

Q. So a year ago you were right in the same exact place talking about the expectations after turning a lot of the production and going to the Orange Bowl, and five months later you're back in Charlotte, but not at the ACC Championship, but at the Duke's Mayo Bowl. What's it going to take for in this year to be not at the Duke's Mayo Bowl, but at the ACC Championship instead?

MACK BROWN: Our guys have been talking about three things: They've been talking about passion, they've been talking about accountability, they've been talking about toughness. If we had more of those three ingredients with our team we could have won at Pitt when we were overtime against the conference champ. We could have won at NC State when we had a nine-point lead with two minutes left in the game. We have to go back and make sure that we're addressing all the little things on and off the field that we need to do to play to a standard.

We have done really well at Kenan Stadium. We haven't played well enough and won enough close games on the road, so we've got to do a better job with road games, and we've got to do a better job of finishing close games, and we feel like with the accountability of this team in the offseason that we're in a much better position for do that right now than we were last year.

Q. You talk about losing Sam, and aside from his on-the-field production, he was also a really big leader for you guys in the locker room. Early on who have you seen fill that void of leadership within the locker room either on the field or off the field?

MACK BROWN: When you start looking at leadership, we've got 15 guys on the Leadership Committee that were chosen by their teammates. Here's three of them. You start looking at British Brooks. British is a young guy that got into school, earned a scholarship to be the special teams player that he has become, and then became special teams captain, and then last year really jumped out as a running back at the end of the year and took over the starting position at running back this spring.

Josh Downs caught over 100 balls last year. Arguably the best receiver in the country, in a year where we had the sacks and had some issues. Those two guys have stepped up on offense and in special teams as leaders. And then you have Ced Gray who last year played over 900 plays from Charlotte. A guy that, like British, wasn't highly recruited, but now he is one of the best players on our team and best leaders on our team.

These guys and a bunch of other guys like them. We have some really good grad transfers, older guys. They're going to have to be the ones that help some of the talented young guys step up and play with confidence. That's why these three are here today.

Q. We know that here in the ACC we have one more season of divisions before we switch to that 3-5-5 model. What can you say about this final year in divisions, and what you think about that 3-5-5?

MACK BROWN: I'm a guy that believed in the divisions. I love having Coastal and Atlantic. I loved having a championship game with the two winners. I thought it was that way a lot of the time with the North and the South and the Big 12 when I was there.

I was disappointed that we changed it, but it also gives our team and our coaches some opportunities to play people that they wouldn't play as often and maybe a chance for the ACC to match up better teams.

Q. You talked about Cedric becoming a leader on that defensive side. What do you see from him from a football standpoint and some other players emerging as leaders on the defensive side as well?

MACK BROWN: Ced was a guy that played safety and wide receiver. He played in the slot, and we saw his aggressiveness, his passion, his love for playing the game and his leadership. Didn't even realize this, but we were the only Power 5 offer he had, and here he is sitting up here as one of the best players not only in the ACC, but in the country.

To help him we've got to play better up front. You've got a lot of guys up front now that have a couple of years experience that were very talented young guys, but they've got to get off blocks and make sure that we penetrate. Then our linebackers have to play more downhill and put us in a position where we can stop the run on first down. We haven't had enough turnovers. You usually don't force turnovers as readily unless it's second and long, third and long when you have your quarterback in a bad position, and the offensive coordinator, his game plan shrinks, and he is trying to throw the ball on second and long and third and long. Then you have to get pass rush.

You need pass rush out of the front four so your linebackers can play in coverage. And I'm really excited about what Gene Chizik brings to our defense. Obviously, won a national championship with us as a defensive coordinator at Texas. He won a national championship at Auburn, so the guy knows what he is doing. He has done a tremendous job with the other coaches. He brought Charlton Warren in with him of teaching and developing our defense. We're doing a better job with fundamentals. We're doing a better job with tracking and playing with low pads, pursuit angles.

I really am excited about what I've seen out of our defense this spring and our team is more competitive. They've really competed with each other, but you've got Noah Taylor that came in as a pass rusher from Virginia. You've got Des Evans who is in his third year. You have Jahvaree Ritzie, some young guys. Kedrick Bingley, he has had three operations, and he looks well now, and he is 316 pounds. You have Keeshawn Silver, a lot of the younger guys now that hopefully will see more in that front moving forward.

Q. Despite the 6-7 record last year and all of the losses, says you guys have got a lot of the talent coming in. You have Josh, Cedric, and British coming in and stepping into those leadership roles at different positions, but it seems like this team is being criminally underrated. What are your feelings about that?

MACK BROWN: I love it because we were criminally overrated last year. So I tried to get us to be the 130th team with the expectation this year, but we're a little bit higher than that.

What last year's team did really went unnoticed, the positive things they did. They beat Miami for a third time in a row. They beat Duke for a third time in a row. They beat a top ten Wake Forest team.

There are a lot of great things we did, but what we didn't do is we weren't consistent, and that's my fault. The team, they take on the personality of the head coach, and if your team is playing inconsistently, that meant I coached them inconsistently, and I hate that. It just makes me sick when our team doesn't play with passion every week. That's what I've seen these guys do every day of spring practice.

That's why I'm so much more excited about where we are. These guys will make their expectations, but really and truly if I was in your seat for five years and they had me picking the top 15 and the top 25, and I was usually wrong because what happens before the season after this press conference when we're all picking who are the best teams, we don't know who is going to be hurt, don't know who is going to step up, we don't know how many fumbles you're going to have, we don't know who is going to be a great player on defense, we don't know about your kicking game and all those answers have to come from the field.

That's where I feel like this is the best staff that we've had, maybe the best staff I've had in 33 years now, going on 34 years of coaching, and I really like their continuity and I really like the way that they have taught these guys this spring and I'm excited about the response from these guys back to them. I just like what I'm seeing.

Q. Coach, how is your day-to-day, week-to-week change with NIL? You're now a year into it. Can you go into that?

MACK BROWN: NIL is a wonderful thought, and it's a great thing because these guys work so hard. People can't imagine how hard they work. They're like Olympic athletes. They work every day. And there's risk with injury when you are playing.

A musician from the student body can make money playing at a bar or playing at a concert. An artist, he or she can make money selling their art, so why shouldn't our guys be able to make money selling their brand and their name, image, and likeness?

It's teaching them how to be entrepreneurs and how to make money. It's teaching them how to give back, because a lot of them are giving back to charities. It's teaching them how to pay taxes, which I didn't learn for a long time. It's teaching them how to use agents for marketing purposes before they have to use an agent for the NFL. And they're making some money. Tylee Craft, our young receiver who has cancer, he has been able to work through some of the costs of his mom not working while she's coming up here because he sold some T-shirts and had a golf tournament.

There are so many positive things with name, image, and likeness. Where we missed it as a group is that we didn't have any guardrails. Then that starts affecting recruiting, and you don't want to ever get to a position where you can't keep recruiting competitive.

If teams just start paying young guys, they may make a poor decision because they took the money or the family took the money, but it might not be the right education for them. It might not be the school that they should attend because that's where they're going to live when they get through, and they'll have better jobs to make a whole lot more money than they're being offered in some NIL deal in recruiting.

Before cheaters were cheating, but we could at least threaten them some with the NCAA. So to me it's going to take the NCAA to step up and stop some of these people that are throwing around cash so readily before that will slow down, number one. Secondly, we've got to get a lot of smart people together because this is a new world problem in our business, and it's a real problem, and we have to figure out how to stop it because I don't think some of this is healthy for the young people that are involved.

So has it changed our life? Yes. We worry about them every day. We had a group called Booster come in the other day to help these guys make more money. Everybody on our team. And coaches would like for everybody to make the money.

I don't know how many people on our team are making money from NIL because I'm not supposed to, and I don't know how much they make. That's just the way it's supposed to work, but I want our guys to be able to make as much money as anybody in the country, and I want those opportunities there for them.

I want our collective to be good. I want our boosters to step up and have that money and that collective. Whether we like it or not, we all know that the better you do, the more money you make, the better the players do, the more we win, the more people are willing to give to the collective.

We're all learning as we work through this process, but I think it's a great thing. We just need to get some guardrails.

THE MODERATOR: Coach, thank you. You can switch places with British Brooks. We'll get our senior running back up for a couple of minutes, questions for him.

Q. North Carolina has had in recent years a run of running backs come through that back field. Guys in the NFL, Ty Chandler just left last year, and now you're stepping into that lead running back role. What do you see yourself being in this offense that maybe the other guys didn't bring, or what did you take from those guys that you're going to now bring to this North Carolina back field?

BRITISH BROOKS: I just want to bring leadership role to this young offense that we've got. We have young quarterbacks, young wide receiver room, and ultimately, a young running back room. I've got probably two years on most guys in that room. I just want to be that leader, that mentor for the young guys.

I'm just happy for the opportunity to have that leadership role.

Q. British, North Carolina led the league in rushing last year, but more than 800 of those yards came from quarterback Sam Howell. With two new quarterbacks, would you expect the run game to be more running back-centric this year?

BRITISH BROOKS: There's no telling. There's really no telling. I would hope. Just let the whole running back room just go crazy this year, but I'm trusting in our scheme and whatever our coach calls, he calls. 100%.

Q. Coach had spoken on the small things that needed fixing that ultimately lead up to greater events. For you, what are you working on focusing on so you can make those adjustments he has spoken on, finishing up the close games? What are you working on particularly?

BRITISH BROOKS: Just working on finishing. Exaggerating how we finish every drill, every play, every rep in the weight room. Just exaggerating on finishing. Finishing is the top priority right now.

Q. Hailing from Gastonia, which isn't that far away here, what does it mean to you to be in state and represent not only the Tarheels, but to represent your hometown that's right around the corner?

BRITISH BROOKS: It means a lot personally because I grew up a Tarheel fan, and a lot of people around me grew up a Tarheel fan. When I go back home, it's rejoiceful for a lot of the times. You don't see a bunch of State and Duke fans when I'm from. It's always been Carolina my whole life. Just to represent North Carolina means the world to me right now.

THE MODERATOR: British, thank you. You can switch places with Josh now. We'll bring up our junior wide receiver for a few minutes of conversation. Josh, we'll start to your right, far right.

Q. You are one of the most productive receivers in the nation last year. Ranked top ten in receiving with over 100 receptions on the season. What's one of the biggest things that you have worked on coming into your junior year?

JOSH DOWNS: I would say being more versatile and being a leader. I'm playing more outside this season. Not just in the slot. Lining up in the back field as well.

Also, just leading that wide receiver room with my fellow partner, Antoine Green. It's a young room. We have a lot of young talent, but they can make a difference. They're just young.

Guiding them, leading them, showing them the ropes, helping them in different areas where they're not really familiar. That's the main thing I'm doing.

Q. We've seen multiple Biletnikoff Award winners come out the ACC. You're possibly top of the class when it comes to being able to win that award this year. Is that something that you are shooting for? Are you just trying to be as productive as you can for this North Carolina offense?

JOSH DOWNS: Definitely just trying to be as productive as I can for the offense and just improve on last year. I'm not just striving to win a certain award here and there. I'm trying to do what I can for my team to help us win, whether that's catching balls, blocking, being a decoy, taking a double-team and letting somebody else make the play. Just anything to help my team win.

Q. You are on a lot of award watchlists and a lot of mock drafts. What's something you learned from Sam last year or even the team last year about keeping those accolades out of the way and letting your play speak for itself?

JOSH DOWNS: From Sam, I mean, Sam always kept a level head. If you know Sam Howell, he is always the same person every day. He is never up. He is never down. He always just keeps a level head.

Then guys like Mike Carter, Javonte Williams, Dyami Brown, they were all guys on those mock drafts too, and they went out there that last year and balled out and put it on the table.

You can be on all the mock drafts and preseason watchlists, but if you don't do it in the next month, it doesn't matter. I'm not really looking at that. I'm just looking forward to playing.

Q. You spoke on Sam Howell just now. What you can say about the quarterback battle right now and the relationships that you are building with both of them in preparation for the season and, obviously, with camp coming up?

JOSH DOWNS: These two guys, they've just been getting ready for the position, Drake Maye and Jacolby Criswell. I was sitting about Dazz Newsome two years ago, and nobody knew who I was. I feel like it's the same situation.

I've known Jacolby since I came here. That's my dog. I've known Drake for a while. Seeing both of those guys get better and being able to display their talent this year is going to be something great to see. I'm not really worried about the quarterback position as a lot of people are because I know we have talent there. It's going to be good to watch.

THE MODERATOR: A question from here at the podium: You scored a touchdown in eight straight games last year, which makes me wonder, do you think about the end zone every time you touch the ball?

JOSH DOWNS: Of course. If you're not thinking about the end zone when you get the ball, what else are you thinking about? There are certain times when you have to get the first down, but every time I touch the ball, I want to get to the zone and get six. That's the main thing.

THE MODERATOR: There are a lot of eyes on you heading into the season. Do you feel those eyes upon you? Do you read the chatter about you?

JOSH DOWNS: I see it here and there because I do run my social media profiles and all that. I see the articles. I see different watchlists. I don't let it get to me like that. I just go out there every day and work, do what I can because at the end of the day if you put in the work, the results are going to come, so yeah.

THE MODERATOR: What would we be surprised to learn about you?

JOSH DOWNS: Oh, I like golf. I don't mind playing golf. I really want to get good at tennis too. Those are two things that I feel like I could have as a good hobby.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. We can switch places with Cedric if you like. Cedric Gray, a bit of a late addition here to the line-up, but happy to have him, the junior, the linebacker for North Carolina. Questions for Cedric as we start to close our time out with North Carolina.

Q. Cedric, North Carolina last year, as you know, was down in the lower echelon in defensive statistics, 10th in defensive scoring, 10th in yards given up. You played in a lot of track meets where the offense had to outscore them. Much different outlook for this year. What has Coach Chizik brought to stabilize the defense, and you had a lot of returning guys, a lot of depth. How good can this defense be?

CEDRIC GRAY: I think one of the things that Coach Chizik is doing is really creating a standard amongst the defense, creating a culture amongst the defense and how we're going to play as a defensive team. We're all going to run to the ball. We're all going to tackle, and we're all going to execute what he tells us to do.

He is really just honing in on the little details and little adjustments and stuff like that. I think it will be a big difference in our defense this year.

Q. You heard from Coach calling you one of the leaders on this team and just what you have stepped up to do. Looking at your journey to Carolina, how much have you grown, and what can you say in response to the fact that your head coach believes in the leadership that you bring?

CEDRIC GRAY: I definitely had an interesting journey to Carolina, as Coach Mack Brown said. University of North Carolina was my only Power 5 offer. Even in high school I kind of had a chip on my shoulder, so coming in I knew I just had to work, and one day an opportunity would present itself. Luckily, I got that opportunity last year.

I think I've always been a leader. I'm a very outspoken person, so I just kind of carried that over. As you can see, Coach believes in me, and I'm ready to lead this team and lead the defense.

Q. During your time with UNC, you've see linebackers Jeremiah Gemmel and Chazz Surratt move to the NFL. Kind of slotted to take that lead linebacker role over this year. What do those guys teach you, and how are you going to use what you have learned this season?

CEDRIC GRAY: Yeah, definitely. I came in freshman, Chazz Surratt, it was his last season. I think one of the biggest things he helped me with was really just learning how to be a college athlete, learning how to be -- just to play at this level. The difference between high school and college.

Then my relationship with Jeremiah, we were definitely built on much more of a friendship together playing alongside him last year. I think me and him kind of got into the technicalities of football, the intellectual Xs and Os of football a lot. I think he really helped me out with that.

Those two guys have done a lot more me. I appreciate them, and I wish them the best at the next level.

Q. You had eight tackles, one sack at Pitt. You had, I believe, 11 tackles at Florida State. What was your favorite game from last year, and how do you want to improve on that game?

CEDRIC GRAY: My favorite game personally for me I would probably say would be the Miami game. I had a TFL, about six tackles, an interception, and the game-winning interception.

I think really just having that game-winner interception at an 8:00 game on ESPN under the lights, I mean, there was no feeling like that. I would definitely say that was my favorite game from last year.

THE MODERATOR: Last question from the podium on a lighter note. A little disappointing that Coach isn't on stage as I ask this question. We've seen Coach dance on Twitter, on YouTube. You guys have seen Coach dance up close and personal. Describe Coach's dance moves in one word.

CEDRIC GRAY: Goofy. (Laughing).

THE MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, that's North Carolina. Guys, thanks for being with us today, and good luck this season.