Mack Brown's assistant interview process once included a look inside the candidates trunk

Mack Brown has hired a small army of assistant coaches across almost four decades on the sideline, at Appalachian State, Tulane, North Carolina, Texas, and back again at North Carolina on a list that includes guys like Will Muschamp, Manny Diaz, Bryan Harsin and Major Applewhite - just to name a few. 

Ask him how he separated the guys worth hiring from the ones who weren't, and the answer had nothing to do with a resume.

"I always wanted to be the guy that wasn't a good golfer, 'cause I never thought that was a good thing for coaches," Brown shared. 

Then he went on to share why taking a look inside the trunk of a candidate was part of his process too.

"I always said, when I'm trying to interview an assistant coach, I'd go look in his trunk, and if he had a fishing rod and a golf club, I wasn't gonna hire him."

The point underneath the comment is one every longtime coach recognizes. Brown wanted assistants whose spare hours went into the job, not out on the lake or the back nine.

He is not the only head coach to build a hiring test out of something you'd never find on a coaching tree.

In May of 2012, in his second year at Vanderbilt, James Franklin went on 104.5 The Zone in Nashville and laid out a filter that got him in a heap of trouble. "I've been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I've seen his wife," Franklin said. "If she looks the part, and she's a D1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That's part of the deal."

Franklin tried to tie the logic back to recruiting. He said there was a strong correlation between the confidence it takes to walk up and talk to a woman and the confidence it takes to walk into a high school and sell a kid on your program. It did not go over well. He apologized on Twitter within days, calling it an attempt at humor from a father of two daughters. 

Franklin left for Penn State in 2014 and has spent the last decade as one of the more accomplished coaches in the Big Ten and is now entering his first season as Virginia Tech's head coach, where he retained former Hokies head coach Brent Pry as his defensive coordinator.

Nick Saban gave a cleaner version of the same instinct on the Pat McAfee Show last fall. Saban said he looked for coaches with "aspirations instead of needing inspiration," guys who carried their own goals and didn't need to be lit up every morning. He wanted a staff full of different strengths, some who could recruit, some who could teach technique, some who could motivate, and he wanted guys who wanted to be head coaches themselves.

Every coach mentioned (and well beyond) are chasing the same answer, which is whether the guy across the desk will outwork the job once the cameras are off. Brown looked in the trunk. Franklin, clumsily and by his own admission, looked at the family. Saban looked for ambition.

The tools have gotten better since Brown popped a trunk in a parking lot. Background checks, references who will actually pick up the phone, a portal-era paper trail on how a guy recruits and develops players. The instinct behind all of it hasn't moved an inch. You are still trying to find out, before you hand anybody a headset, how much they love the game and everything that comes along with it.

Hear Brown's full comments below, and stay tuned to The Scoop for more.