In their 58 combined seasons, it certainly hasn’t been easy. “My wife has told me, ‘You’ve always been an underdog,’” Watson said. “‘You like that, you go to those kinds of places.’ It’s just like being here at Tennessee Tech. Every job I’ve had has been tough, but it’s been fun for me. I’ve always felt like we’ve left them better than we took them. Mack had a little bit of that, but he’s had Appalachian State, who was good, then he was at North Carolina, which was good, but not when he got it, then Texas. “We’ve gone different routes. There’s been different pressures on both of us in different ways. His is more of keeping it up at this level and can’t fall down. Mine is ‘Can you ever get this going here? Is it possible to do?’ There’s just been two completely different ways to go about it. His advice for those jobs I’ve had and my advice for the jobs he’s had has just been the special piece and I think he would tell you the same thing.” Watson, in his 29 seasons combined as head coach with Austin Peay, Cincinnati, Rice, Vanderbilt, Alabama-Birmingham and Tennessee Tech has won 126 of those games. Mack, in his 29 seasons as head coach at Tulane, North Carolina and Texas, has won 237 games.
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“I don’t think either one could have done it without each other,” Watson said. “We’re so close in a professional way — of course, you’re close in a personal way, you’re brothers — but we have had the professional piece to pass things off on each other. We’d ask this question, what would you do in this situation. I’m not sure either one of us would have stayed in it this long if we didn’t have each other to pass a lot of the tough decisions by each other. “We talk or text nearly every day to every other day during the season. No other coach gets to do that. It’s a dog-eat-dog business we’re in and coaches aren’t going to do that with each other. To have a brother who will do that with you and vice versa, and always there when you know you’re needed over something critical that’s happened, that’s probably what’s kept us both in the business longer than we probably would have stayed.” Mack said, “We swap ideas with video back and forth. It’s a great sounding board for each other when something comes up or difficulties that come up where you don’t know what direction to go in. It’s really easy to bounce it off of someone that you totally trust in your family that’s been doing this for a long time. He can go, ‘I’ve had this happen and here’s what we did and I like the way it worked.”