CHAPEL HILL — From the front-row vantage point where he has witnessed these scenes unfold again and again, North Carolina assistant football coach Tommy Thigpen already knows the clockwork that’s sure to be involved before the proverbial curtain goes up.
A well-regarded high school prospect and his family are visiting on a recruiting tour, and Tar Heels coach Mack Brown is welcoming them into his office at Kenan Football Center.
Better come back later if you need an audience with Brown. In there, it’s showtime.
“It ain’t gonna be no 20-minute meeting,” Thigpen told the Burlington Times-News. “If he really wants them, man, he’s going to stay in that meeting and he’s going to hold their attention for an hour, hour and a half. He knows how to work a room and he’s perfected the skill of language, how to talk to people and how to captivate them. That’s Mack, and that’s his gift.”
For Thigpen, the linebackers coach, and colleagues Kevin Donnalley and Natrone Means — the three North Carolina football staff members were standout players under Brown and have come to work alongside him, connecting eras past and present — Brown’s stage presence isn’t an act, but the genuine collision of his burning competitiveness and homespun charm in concert together.
Mack in full magic mode, a master connector and builder, then and now.
Some 30 years ago, Brown engineered a Tar Heels turnaround, his baby blue blueprint prioritizing in-state recruiting while driven by the force of his engaging personality. And it’s happening again here some three decades later, that same formula proving timeless and delivering once more during his encore in Chapel Hill.
In Brown’s first stint on the job, North Carolina went from 2-20 across his first two seasons (1988-89) to 21-3 across his last two seasons (1996-97), from struggling to streaking, the transformation fueled by a restocking effort during those early years that netted receiver Corey Holliday, linebacker Dwight Hollier, fullback William Henderson and the linebacker Thigpen out of Virginia, defensive back Rondell Jones from Maryland, and defensive lineman Austin Robbins from Washington, D.C. — all future NFL players.
But the recruiting focus became anchored in-state. And with running back / receiver Eric Blount (Ayden), running back Randy Jordan (Warrenton), the offensive lineman Donnalley (Raleigh), receiver Bucky Brooks (Raleigh), defensive back Bracey Walker (Spring Lake), defensive back Thomas Smith (Gates County), tight end / offensive lineman Ethan Albright (Greensboro), tight end Deems May (Lexington), linebacker Bernardo Harris (Chapel Hill), defensive back Jimmy Hitchcock (Concord) and the running back Means (Harrisburg), the homegrown haul supplied a crop of future NFL talent for Brown to bank on, despite the lean seasons in the beginning that could’ve been a crippling albatross for recruiting.
“He just starts to make you believe,” said Donnalley, the 13-year NFL veteran, who serves as the Tar Heels’ director of high school relations. “I think that’s one of the first things he instilled in that first group, was take pride and take ownership of the state. It’s almost like your birthright. This is the first public university, and you need to own this state in football.”
The third season of Brown’s second go-around in Chapel Hill starts Sept. 3, and the recruiting classes upon his return have featured impactful in-state flavor. The Tar Heels flipped star quarterback Sam Howell (Monroe), previously committed to Florida State, to significantly boost their 2019 signees, and have since added back-to-back highly ranked classes on the national level, topped by linebacker Desmond Evans (Sanford) in 2020 and defensive end Keeshawn Silver (Rocky Mount) in 2021.
Fourteen of the 18 recruits North Carolina landed on the last national signing day were in-state products, including six of the top 10 prospects in the state, led by Silver and quarterback Drake Maye (Charlotte). During the past weekend, elite defensive lineman Travis Shaw (Greensboro) jumped on board, the Tar Heels’ highest-rated commit in 15 years, and the 15th top 10 in-state prospect to pick North Carolina since Brown returned.
There’s tangible momentum in recruiting that can be gathered and harnessed and used to propel a program, an accomplishment that Brown can claim again, now as a grey-haired grandfather days shy of his 70th birthday. But recruiting also often hinges on the abstract, a certain perceived fit or how a place feels to a prospect, another area where Thigpen points to Brown’s powerful brand of charisma — an eternal art form, to Thigpen.
“Why do people pick this school?” Thigpen said. “They always talk about that feel. ‘It just felt right.’ Well what’s that feeling you’re talking about? That feeling is the fact that person, it felt like they’ve known me all my life.
“That’s what Mack does. When you walk away, you feel like, ‘Dang I’ve been knowing that man for 20-something years.’ And then you meet him a second time and all of a sudden he comes back with your parents and he’s asking your mom about her job and asking the newest trends for her career. So every time you walk away from him, you just feel like you’re that much closer to the Carolina program. That’s Mack.”
Different Means of recruiting
Before he became one of the most productive rushers in Tar Heels football history, and later a battering ram All-Pro running back in the NFL — memorably nicknamed Natrone Means Business by Chris Berman of ESPN fame — Means considers himself perhaps the least-challenging recruit Brown ever courted.
Means grew up in Cabarrus County, watching Tar Heels games on fall Saturdays and their Sunday coach’s shows on Charlotte television station WBTV. He was hooked from an early age, the in-state motivation molded during his childhood years, without Brown having to use birthright as a recruiting pitch.
“As a kid, this is the only place I wanted to go,” said Means, now an offensive analyst on the North Carolina staff, “so when the opportunity presented itself, I was all over it. I remember when I got just the general interest letter, the mass-mailing letter, I walked around like it was a hand-written note.”
Means would join Harris, then a Tar Heels target from Chapel Hill High School, for old-fashioned landline phone conversations — social media didn’t exist then in the late 1980s, and cell phones had yet to explode into the mainstream — that amounted to recruiting calls of their own. If either matched up against an intriguing uncommitted prospect in football or basketball, or met such a kid on a visit to another school, Means and Harris would take up the pursuit of attempting to convince him to join them at North Carolina.
They were beating the bushes their way. Hitchcock, a childhood friend in neighboring Concord, provided Means’ pet project. South Carolina had an interest in Hitchcock at quarterback. Hitchcock later went on to an eight-year NFL career as a defensive back, after playing that position in college for the Tar Heels.
“I don’t know what his full list was,” Means said, “but my main goal was to keep him away from the University of South Carolina. Jimmy and I grew up together. We were friends all our lives. I worked him really hard.
“Bernardo Harris and I were two of the guys early on who knew where we wanted to go, and Bernardo was a guy who would spearhead phone calls. We’d get on the phone and we’d talk and we’d call other guys. There was the basketball circuit. We’d find out if guys were in the area. If you’re going to be here, if you’re going to be there. We were trying to sit down and get face-to-face with guys and get them on board.”
Upon their arrival in Chapel Hill, that already-established camaraderie meshed with Brown’s message and method. Meanwhile, Donnalley helped pave the way for the start of Means’ power-running exploits — setting the launch code for another hard-earned nickname, the Natrone Bomb — that piled up 3,074 rushing yards and 34 touchdowns on the ground in a matter of three college seasons (1990-92).
Donnalley had endured North Carolina’s back-to-back one-win seasons in 1988 and 1989. He could see Brown’s vision taking shape from the ground level, particularly in comparison to the roster construction of former Tar Heels coach Dick Crum, the predecessor to Brown.
“The roster was riddled with Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Delaware,” Donnalley said. “There were a lot of North Carolina players, but they expanded their recruiting to a lot of different areas in the Midwest and up the East Coast. That’s just not the heart of what Carolina football should be. To me what Mack did, and it was essential, he knew there was a lot of North Carolina talent, and a lot of really good players started to come in.
“You’ve got to win in-state recruiting and keep those guys at home. It’s crucial. It’s for your fan base, it’s for your alumni, it’s for your past lettermen that grew up in this state and played here and are still living here. They want to see that. And I think now this second time with Mack coming back, you could see it with his first classes, the strength of the recruits he’s gotten out of the state is going to be the foundation for this team to come.”
Obama in two steps
Thirty years later, Means still encounters those moments that transport him back, the déjà vu creeping across him when Brown addresses the Tar Heels and kicks the passion up to extra levels, effecting a preacher in his pulpit.
Mack in full magic mode, a master connector and builder, then and now.
“You can look out at the players when Coach is talking,” Means said, “and you can definitely see yourself. And now I look at where we are, I look at what the message is, it’s become a national story. Where in the beginning we were fighting for that recognition, now I believe the recognition is there. I think it’s about finishing the deal now.”
Thigpen became a three-time All-Atlantic Coast Conference linebacker at North Carolina, and ranks fourth all-time in tackles in program history. He served as a captain of the 1992 team that went 9-3 and won the Peach Bowl, to deliver the breakthrough first bowl victory of Brown’s head coaching career.
As a Parade All-American and the Defensive Player of the Year in Virginia during his decorated high school career, Thigpen had a number of college football suitors in recruiting. What they were offering mostly seemed similar, until Brown entered Thigpen’s home and took up residence capturing his family’s attention.
“After a while everything looked the same,” Thigpen said. “You figure the stadiums all hold 60,000 and they’ve all got great educations and they’ve all got great facilities. But what was the difference? My parents were like, ‘Look, everybody’s selling you this same story of playing football and playing in the league and all this. But here’s a guy that’s telling you, yeah, you’re going to do all that, but I’m going to be the person that helps you get jobs after your career in football is over. And I’ll always be there for you.’ Nobody had ever told me that, and that’s one thing my parents picked up on.”
Decades after that visit, Thigpen found the pages of the book “The Tipping Point” resonating in a deeply personal way, with author Malcolm Gladwell applying theories about people who possess particular and rare sets of social expertise.
“Connectors, he’s one of those guys,” Thigpen said of Brown. “If I wanted to get to (Barack) Obama in two steps or to George Bush in two steps or the Prince of Saudi Arabia in two steps, well, Mack is that person who connects everybody. He knows everybody from your administration on campus, to your highest boosters on campus, to your top professors on campus. And he’s got that ability just to bring communities and people together, to move people. That’s Mack.”
Adam Smith is a sports reporter for the Burlington Times-News and USA TODAY Network. You can reach him by email at asmith@thetimesnews.com or @adam_smithTN on Twitter.
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This article originally appeared on Times-News: ‘That’s his gift’: Mack Brown’s recruiting blueprint, magic presence prove timeless for UNC
