Down at the heels: their football program battered and blistered, UNC coaches wear out lots of shoe leather selling the team.

• Author: Pace, Lee
• Position: University of North Carolina

Their football program battered and blistered, UNC coaches wear out lots of shoe leather selling the team.

Question: What do Mack Brown and Billy Graham have in common?

Answer: Both can make a stadium filled with 50,000 people say "Jesus Christ" in unison.

It's 7: 5 on a Wednesday night in mid-November. Most of the employees have gone for the night. Only the sales force and the CEO remain. On the job since 7 a.m. and with several more hours to go, they sit in small offices, note pads with names and phone numbers on their desks. The top guy, his face wan and eyes tired, wanders from office to office, checking updates.

Profits are down. The stock is tumbling. Customers are grumbling, and the boss is the butt of radio talk-show jokes.

Carl Torbush looks at his telephone and sees that the seven outgoing lines are lit. "Gosh dog it," he says. "Every line is busy."

"I can't get anyone on the phone," Darrell Moody says. "All mine are at basketball practice."

Somebody has a prospect in Oklahoma. Another one is talking to Chicago. Others are canvassing the state, from Asheville to Hamlet, Wilmington to Hickory. Donnie Thompson's pitch comes booming through the wall of Torbush's office.

"Son, look at the big picture," he bellows into the phone. "You'll spend three hours a day in football. You spend 70 percent of your time with classmates - in school, studying, around campus. Make your decision based on the entire package, not just the football.

"Hey, we had the best freshmen in the state last year. We've got the best in the state this year. With you coming here, we'll have the best next year. Before you know it, Carolina's back on top."

Mack Brown slips into the office, and Thompson scribbles on his note pad: "l. UNC, 2. Notre Dame, 3. Duke." Brown's face lights up, and he makes a triumphant fist. "Good player here," he says. "We need this guy."

Brown, head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, runs a multimillion-dollar business. He and his sales staff - his assistant coaches - are trying to move a product: UNC football. To do that, they must close deals with top talent, convincing high-school stars to invest their futures in this school and his program.

It's not the easy sale it once was.

Outside their offices, Kenan Memorial Stadium sits vacant. In three days, one of the school's worst football teams ever will end the dismal '89 season by playing archrival Duke. Nearly 50,000 paying customers will be there. The Tar Heels are 1-9, and they've been blown out of four of those games. To turn around the program, sales skills, the ability to get those kids to look past the present, will be more important than coaching acumen.

X's and O's are overrated," Brown says. "Good players are what win football games."

As legendary Clemson Coach Frank Howard once told a reporter after a loss at Duke: "Turning point? Damn, buddy, the turning point was three years ago when I didn't get me no halfbacks."

As any good salesperson will tell you, a customer buys the salesman as much as the product. So late into the evening, the coaches call their prospects, checking in to let them know they're interested, trying to cement personal relationships that might tip the scales in favor of the Heels over State, Duke, Wake, other ACC rivals and even national powers such as Notre Dame. In a busy recruiting month, the football office's phone bill averages around $6,500, from a recruiting budget of $295,000 out of an annual budget of $3.04 million.

Torbush, who coaches linebackers when he's not recruiting, spies an open phone line and...