How Mack Brown Navigates Change

Mack Brown has coached college football for over 40 years at 10 different schools. He’s won a national championship and three times been named his conference’s coach of the year.

So, it’d be easy to understand if he were cynical about the sweeping changes that have come to his sport so late in his career. But he’s not.

“So many coaches are miserable right now,” Brown told The Athletic recently. “They’re worried about their jobs, and they’re worried about getting fired, and they’re worried about the (transfer) portal, and they’re worried about name, image and likeness. ‘College football is crazy and it’s not what it should be.’

“I really told myself I’m not gonna be that guy,” he added. “I’m gonna work as hard as I can and do the best job I can do.”

Change can be maddening, particularly if we’ve done things a certain way for an extended period of time.

New rules and requirements, scheduling overhauls, quotas that now suddenly must be met, initiatives that we’re convinced will undermine our authority and add stacks of paper to our desks.

We romanticize a past that likely wasn’t nearly as rosy as we’re now portraying it and reason that we’d be far more successful if things could go back to the way they once were.

But as U.S. Army General Eric Shinseki famously said, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

As legitimate as our complaints might be, times change. The present circumstances apply to everyone, and the only thing we can now control is how we respond moving forward.

For Brown, that means focusing on what’s in his power and not wallowing about what isn’t.

“I’ll be darned if I’m gonna sit around and be miserable,” he said. “I’m just not gonna do it.”

Neither should we. Embrace change and find new ways.

Or, face irrelevance.