North Carolina head coach Mack Brown hired Gene Chizik as assistant head coach for defense to his staff during the offseason.
Before accepting a position with the Tar Heels, Chizik wanted former Tennessee assistant Charlton Warren to join him and help coach North Carolina’s defense.
Brown explained the hiring process of Chizik and Warren on the show “Packer and Durham.”
“The first call I made was to Gene Chizik,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Gene, do you want to do this? Because I need your help.’
“He said yes, I do want to do it.”
Brown explained Chizik hung up and called him back.
“He said I do need one thing, it’s not a deal breaker,” Chizik told Brown.
Brown asked Chizik what he needed.
“He said I need Charlton Warren to come with me,” Brown explained. “He said he’s my guy, he’s unbelievable, one of the best in the country. We’ve been there before. We know the place, we’re familiar with it. It will be a seamless transition.
“I said let me think about it because that means you have to make some hard decisions. You’ve got to change people’s lives, that’s not an easy thing to do. I called him back and said we’re good — you’ve got to make sure Charlton will come. Then I called Tom Allen, the coach at Indiana who I have so much respect for, a lot of people aren’t calling the head coach before they talk to coaches about coming. I’m always going to do that. It’s very important to me that we do that because that’s who we are, and we are still fighting to have integrity in our business.”
Warren served as defensive backs coach and special teams coordinator in 2017 at Tennessee under then-head coach Butch Jones.
Chizik (defensive coordinator) and Warren (defensive backs) coached together at North Carolina from 2016-16.
Warren coached cornerbacks at Florida in 2018 and defensive backs at Georgia from 2019-20. He was the defensive coordinator with Indiana in 2021.
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