Two coaches, building teams in the ACC, put up the following conference records:
In what probably won't be a shock even to those folks who don't read the titles of posts, Coach A is current football gold standard Mack Brown, and Coach B, John Bunting. And presented this way, the records don't look that different, especially considering the added talent that poured into the ACC between 1992 and 2005.
Now the reason one is the gold standard and the other is on the hot seat does in part rest on the non-conference schedules. Brown, after the back-to-back 1-10 seasons, only lost two regular season games outside the ACC in his remaining eight seasons - to South Carolina in 1990 and Donovan McNabb's Syracuse squad in 1995. Bunting's lost at least two nonconference games every year he's been at UNC. After five years, Brown was slipping into his role as program saviour, while Bunting keeps appearing in columns uncomfortably close to the words "hot seat". So how much of the gap is scheduling, and how much is coaching?