A few weekends ago, Mack Brown and North Carolina held an open practice where media was allowed to attend, and one media member zeroed in on Brown walking around practice, from drill to drill, on his phone.
When asked about that yesterday during his presser, Brown explained that he used to walk around and take notes on with a pen and a pad of paper, but being able to do the same thing on his phone is so much more efficient for the college coaching veteran.
What I found interesting isn't that Brown was taking the notes, but rather what Brown shared about what he does with those phone-notes after the reporter suggested that he seems pretty "hands-off" with coaches during practice.
"I am very hands-on with the coaches in this building and in our staff room. I'm very hard on them and very demanding and they know that. They laugh when people say 'He's so nice,' and 'he's so easy to work for.'"
"Most of what I'm doing is making sure that we're doing everything right as coaches, during practice. A lot of coaches like to yell at assistants on the field, they like to be seen, they like to tell people that they can coach. I have always felt like if I yell at an assistant in front of his players, I am demeaning him in front of them and I am taking away some of their ability to have confidence in him."
"I don't want to do that."
Mack explains why he believes in coaching them on the finer details inside for a few hours, after practices.
"I'm going to coach them inside, away from everybody else, and I believe that it is disrespectful when you're yelling at a coach because of his inability to coach his players. I just don't like that. It's not my style at all."
"I'll have some notes about players, but most of what I do with the players is off video. So we will come off the field and sit down and I will watch two or three hours of practice video and I'll go over every drill and I am constantly writing my staff notes about little things like - don't put the ball on the line every time. Move the ball off the line sometimes because we have to work on alignments. And why are we having false starts? I don't understand that. We don't even have a snap count. So help me understand false starts. Or how can we line up offsides? We have officials out there. Check with the official."
"There's four pages of that kind of stuff. So they get it when they walk in and they look to see if their name is on the staff notes and they're happy if they're not. But I've told them, if you do your job, you won't be on there."
Mack says they also make a point to pull out plays where players are giving great effort, as well as loafs to show to the team to prove a point on what they're looking for on the field.
"That's my job. My job is to tell our guys what I see and what I like, and to tell them what concerns me that needs to be fixed."
"That's my job. To help give our coaches advantages by helping them with things that I don't feel like they're doing as well."
"Our coaches are great. Some of them weren't great when we got here, but when I am hard on them, right now they are great. They want to win. And I have told them, if you disagree with what I have to say, come see me about it, but these are facts that I think needs to get fixed. You can come to me and tell me if I'm not right, and I'll be fine with it, because I'm not always right."
Hear more from Brown in the clip.