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Mack Brown is reportedly hiring Greg Robinson as defensive coordinator and wow that’s bad

Greg Robinson at defensive coordinator is a disaster hire, and may suggest that the Mack Brown thing is a punt after all.

By Chad Floyd
Ohio State v Michigan Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Whoo boy. Let’s keep the “failures in Ann Arbor, Michigan” theme going for a little while longer.

Mack Brown has apparently hired Greg Robinson as defensive coordinator at UNC.

There was a path where the hiring of Brown made sense: dynamic, young coaching staff, with a few potential candidates to ascend to head coach in 2-4 years.

This...is not that.

For those uninitiated, Greg Robinson is a 67-year-old football coach, last seen running the defense for San Jose State in 2014.

That defense, which finished tied for 64th in the nation at 5.52 yards per play, is the best he has employed in the Twitter era.

Robinson was promoted from quality control analyst to defensive coordinator in Mack Brown’s last year at Texas after the firing of Manny Diaz, and was credited with being a “stabilizing force.”

The stabilizing force went 5-37 as head coach at Syracuse, including 2-25 in the Big East. His predecessor, Paul Pasqualoni, had one losing season in 14 years.

Here’s how the stabilizing force fared in his last two years as a full-time defensive coordinator at the P5 level, as he was the DC under Rich Rodriguez at Michigan:

  • 2009: 76th in YPP at 5.63, third-worst in the Big Ten.
  • 2010: 101st in YPP at 6.07, third-worst in the Big Ten, and 8th-worst in the P5.

Did I mention this was at Michigan? In the Big Ten, where offense was still largely played three yards at a time?

Yeah.

Let’s see how some of our friends on Twitter feel about this:

On the most recent Weekly Tar Heel podcast, I gave the Mack Brown hire a “D”, pending his coaching hires. My colleague Jake Lawrence, who was more optimistic than myself, appears to be at least somewhat shaken by this news. Bill Connolly ranted about Carolina blowing its chance to be the best job on the market on Tuesday’s Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody, and will likely blow a gasket on today’s show if they haven’t recorded already.

The goodwill from Tuesday’s introductory press conference, rumors of some inroads being made with Larry Fedora’s recruiting misses, and the good hire of Tim Brewster from Texas A&M is shot.

At this point, let’s hope that someone is getting bad information, because this is really, really bad.

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