Extra Points: Driven

The story of how Mack Hollins bolted from oblivion in 2012-13 to a key role with the Tar Heels and this week is suiting up in the Super Bowl.

By Lee Pace

In the beginning, before the lethal blocks on punt returns and the 65-yard touchdown receptions, before the leather briefcase and the python and the boa, there was the speed—the raw, unadulterated speed.

Brian Hollins knew how fast his younger brother Mack could run. He'd seen it all their lives. "Oh, man, he's just got a different gear," says Brian, who's two years Mack's elder. "He passes people and it looks like he's galloping, not even sprinting. To me he was always a Mustang—not a Corvette."

Marcus Berry saw it watching tape foisted on him by a fellow West Virginia University football alumnus. Richard Hollins was a Mountaineer receiver in the early 1980s and was trying to get the attention of the football staff at Carolina, the school Mack wanted to play for since visiting Chapel Hill as a high school kid in 2008. Berry was the Tar Heels' director of player personnel under Butch Davis from 2009-11 and was impressed with Mack's tape from Wootten High in Rockville, Md.

"Richard and I had that West Virginia connection and developed a rapport," remembers Berry, now the recruiting coordinator at Maryland. "I told him I'd look at Mack's film. I saw a kid who was long and could really, really run. And he seemed to like special teams. Coach Fedora came in that winter of 2012 and we had one preferred walk-on spot left. I stood on the table and said, 'Coach, you gotta take this kid.'"

Any number of guys remember the first full-squad conditioning workout in the summer of 2012, when the team was broken into the skill group (backs, receivers), the middle group (linebackers, tight ends) and the bigs (linemen). They had to run 20 hundred-yard sprints, goal to goal. The idea wasn't to win the race, just beat the minimum time set for each group. And to finish.

"Mack wins the first sprint by 15 yards," remembers Nick Weiler, also a freshman walk-on that year. "The older guys were saying, 'Easy, young buck, we've got a lot more to go, you won't make it to the end.' Mack says, 'You'll see.' He finished every sprint 10 yards ahead of everyone and didn't look like he broke a sweat."

"No one knew who this kid was," adds Jeff Schoettmer, a second-year linebacker in 2012. "He was head and shoulders above everyone. Guys like Tre Boston and Jabari Price said, 'Hey, freshman, make sure you make all your times.' Little did we know what a freak athlete he was. He won every single sprint."

Taylor Vippolis, a track and football standout in high school in New York who was a Tar Heel mid-distance runner his freshman year of 2012-13 before joining football as a walk-on for 2013, won some conditioning heats during preseason camp that year and caught Fedora's eye. The head coach remarked to the team that a "track guy is showing you up" and asked Vippolis if he'd race Hollins one-on-one.

"We look at each other and say, 'Okay,'" says Vippolis. "I start sprinting and I look up after 15 yards and he's across midfield already. If he had run track and been a 400-meter guy, he'd have been All-ACC easily. He doesn't get tired and he strides so long."

So by the time the Fedora era kicks off against Elon on Labor Day weekend 2012, the coaches and players know they have a gazelle in their midst. But can he do anything else? Block? Carry the football? Tackle? Break up passes? At least they'll have a while to figure it out; Hollins will certainly be redshirted in 2012 as a preseason ankle injury has sidelined him early in the year.

Hollins played receiver at Wootten and during a prep-school year at Fork Union in 2011, but he admits he didn't have very good hands. "I could always catch, but I used my body a lot," he remembered three years later. "I was a big 'body-catch' guy. I got to college and said, 'Wow, this is different.' It was a big shock."

He also had some success on defense. John Shuman, the Fork Union coach, remembers putting the 6-foot-4 Hollins at cornerback for the Blue Devils in their rival game against Hargrave Military Academy. Hollins intercepted a pass and sprinted down the sideline for a touchdown—"No one was within a mile of him once he got going," Shuman says. But college was a different kettle of fish.

"They put him at safety first," remembers Quinshad Davis, a freshman receiver in 2012. "Let's just say, covering guys one-on-one wasn't his thing."

"He was lanky and unathletic on defense," Schoettmer adds. "We thought he was just wasting everyone's time over here."

Or could he find a niche on special teams? Hollins listened to one coach while at Fork Union who suggested that deep-snapping might be the only way he'd get on the field at the Division 1 level.

"I said, 'All right.' So, I taught myself how to long-snap," Hollins said. "I've never had to do it in a game, but I know how, just in case."

To Hollins, not of it was a matter of how or if. It was just a matter of when.

One night that summer of 2012, Hollins was hanging out in Graham Dorm, where the football players were housed before the fall semester opened. Weiler was there, so were quarterbacks Kanler Coker and Drew Davis.

"He told us straight up what was going to happen," Weiler says. "It wasn't like this is what I want to do, it's what's going to happen. He said he was going to work his ass off and give the coaches no choice but to put him on scholarship. I was a little jealous of his confidence."

Adds Coker: "I don't remember it exactly, but I'm pretty sure he told us he was going to end up getting a scholarship, being a captain and then get drafted. His favorite team was the Steelers. He said, 'I'm going to the league and play receiver for the Steelers.' He always wanted to be a receiver. Everyone thought he was crazy. He couldn't catch a ball to save his life."

Hollins, Coker and Weiler were all redshirting that fall and sometimes late on Saturday night after home games they'd sneak into Kenan Stadium and run sprints, pound the stairs, throw balls and do cone drills.

"We all wanted to be great, whatever that meant," Coker says. "We knew working hard was the way to achieve that. We were trying to stay out of trouble, and that was a good way to do that on a Saturday night. Someone famous had a quote about being willing to work when others weren't. That kind of drove us."

After midnight following one nocturnal workout, they took a mirror shot in the locker room—three dudes looking tough and showing off their washboard abs. Five years later in the spring of 2017, they gathered again late at night in Smith Center (Coker had access given his roster spot on the basketball team in 2016-17) and replicated the photo. This came after Weiler had earned his spot as the Tar Heels' starting place-kicker in 2015-16 and beaten Florida State with a 54-yard field on the game's final play; after Coker had lost a brother to cancer, given up football because of injury and walked-on to the basketball team and been to two Final Fours and was wearing a national championship ring; and after Hollins' career that included scoring 20 touchdowns and setting a threshold of focus and resolve that helped carry the Tar Heels to the 2015 ACC Coastal Division title.

"It was such an emotional thing to think about where we had each come from," Weiler says. "Each had his own career path. I can tell you I would never have done what I did without Mack. Anytime I started slipping, he'd the first one in my face telling me to get my act together.

"Now Mack's going to the Super Bowl. It's just nuts."

***

Brian Hollins was scouting college choices and business schools in the spring of 2008. He had two grandparents living in Wilmington and an aunt and uncle in Raleigh, so the Hollins family was familiar with North Carolina. Richard and Karyn Hollins brought their three sons south from Rockville for a visit.

"We had a great time," Brian remembers. "It was a beautiful spring day in Chapel Hill, the sun was out. I remember it as well as Mack does. We grew up in Maryland, but Carolina was always kind of our school."

"I fell in love with Chapel Hill and Carolina," Mack says. "From that day, this is where I wanted to be."

Brian wound up getting a half academic scholarship to Stanford and always wanted to live on the West Coast, so he headed to Palo Alto rather than Chapel Hill. But Mack kept his sights set on Chapel Hill. Problem was, Wootten High was more of an academic powerhouse and not so accomplished in athletics, so it didn't attract a lot of college recruiters. Plus, Hollins missed much of his junior year because of an uncomfortable off-the-field incident involving a bully and Mack's refusal to back down from overt aggression. That eventually worked itself out, but Hollins lost valuable time on the field and in the recruiting arena.

Knowing his son's interest in attending Carolina, his father Richard reached out to Berry, who suggested Mack go to Fork Union for a year and use it as a springboard to attract some interest and give Berry some ammunition to go to Butch Davis and perhaps find a spot for Hollins. At Fork Union, Hollins' teammates nicknamed him "Google" because he had an answer to most anything. By the time reveille sounded at 6 a.m., Hollins had already been up an hour and a half working out.

Berry followed Hollins' one season at Fork Union during the Everett Withers transition season of 2011, and then when Larry Fedora took over in early 2012, Berry fought hard to get him one of the remaining preferred walk-on spots. Berry remembered well the blueprint to success for the Friendly High teams in Ft. Washington, Md., where he'd previously been an assistant coach for a decade.

"I have three state championship rings when I was coaching high school because we had a lot of speed," he says. "Speed kills. If you can run, you can play the game and you have a chance to be special."

Hollins' confidence, energy and drive were apparent from that first year in 2012. The staff and team learned of Hollins' quirkiness—he had two pet snakes, some turtles and told his roommates he wanted an alligator or a pet lion—as well as his organizational skills. He's carried a leather briefcase around since his high school days that speaks to his business-like attitude.

Strength and conditioning coach Lou Hernandez first noted Hollins' speed and tireless work ethic. And his jaw basically dropped watching Hollins finish a summer conditioning workout and then come into the strength facility and run more on the treadmill.

"And you know the most impressive thing?" Hernandez muses. "When he was finished, he would wipe the treadmill down and leave it in showroom condition, top to bottom. We were amazed. Never has a kid thought to clean up after himself like that."

That was learned behavior for the Hollins boys. Brian is 26 and is a growth equity investor with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. Drew is 21 and entering his fourth year in the Marines, based in Quantico, Va. And Mack went from oblivion to the Super Bowl. You think there was some structure and discipline in the Hollins household?

"One of my favorite stories is my Dad coming to pick me up a sleepover and taking me back home because I woke up and didn't make my bed that morning," Brian says. "It was that kind of early discipline instilled in all of us that has paid off."

Randy Jordan was the Tar Heels' special teams coordinator and running backs coach from 2012-13, and he and Luke Paschall, a graduate assistant at the time who focused on special teams, noticed him as Blue Dawn and spring ball evolved in early 2013 and knew he could play a big role that fall. Fedora noticed Hollins trying his hand and long-snapping and for the rest of Hollins' career would jokingly call him "Deep snapper."

"Not being a scholarship guy, he had an edginess about him," says Jordan, now the Washington Redskins' running backs coach. "Nobody could run by him. He had this uncanny ability, once the ball was kicked off or punted, it was almost impossible to hold him up. He took it really serious. We saw him running by everyone on the scout team and said, 'We need to look at him as a gunner or on kickoff cover.' It didn't take long for him to find a spot on all four special teams.

"He gave us something you can't coach. He could go down on the cover teams and disrupt things. It forced people to put two guys on him, so that opened it up for other guys to make plays."

That Hollins would struggle to find an identity on the field was borne out by the fact that he moved to receiver for the spring of 2013—he snared a 25-yard touchdown pass from Caleb Pressley for a touchdown in the Blue-White Game—but he was still listed as a defensive back in the 2013 media guide. After every practice, Hollins took at least 100 passes on the JUGS machine, the automatic ball-throwing apparatus that could aim a ball at whatever point and speed the operator wanted. He'd also run routes against air and get quarterbacks to hang late and throw him passes.

Two years later after Carolina's Thursday night win at Pittsburgh during their 11-game victory streak, Hollins made a prodigious catch to set up a field goal by spinning 180 degrees to land a ball thrown to his outside shoulder. He ho-hummed it afterward by saying he'd done that catch hundreds of times in practice and it was no big deal.

"The first year I was at receiver, I would spend at least 20 minutes every day on the ball machine," he said. "I'd turn my body to each side, aim the ball over my shoulder, aim it down low, practice everything except a ball on the numbers. Whatever ball I missed during practice, I'd do a hundred of those afterward."

And as he was grooming his technique, Hollins never wavered for exuding an air of confidence.

"I remember in our one-on-one drills, Mack would say, 'Throw it up and I'll go get it,'" QB Bryn Renner remembers of the August 2013 training camp. "He went against our starting DBs and his attitude was, 'I'm going to catch it and prove I'm better than you are.' There was a swagger and an air about him. In essence he was telling the coaches, 'You will have no choice but to put me on the field.' He carried a chip on his shoulder, that's for sure."

Hollins certainly did find the field that first year, being named special teams captain. His signature throughout that season was throwing a block on a punt return for another freshman, Ryan Switzer, and then sprinting downfield and catching Switzer in time to escort him to the end zone on Switzer's NCAA record-tying five touchdowns. But he didn't catch a pass as Davis, Switzer, Eric Ebron, Bug Howard and T.J. Thorpe were the Tar Heels' prime receiving threats.

By 2014, Hollins was ready to stake his claim on offense as well. Hollins was put on scholarship that summer and could now eat for free at the team training table; no longer would he have to fill up on ramen noodles and peanut butter in his dorm room. Receivers coach Gunter Brewer during August training camp harkened back to the story of a Tar Heel walk-on linebacker from Goldsboro who went on to nearly a decade starting in the NFL.

"Mack plays hard, gives great effort, has a lot of talent," Brewer said. "Hopefully, he will be the David Thornton of our team. He will be if he continues doing what he's done."

Truer words, as they say. Over two-and-a-half years, before his final year was cut in half with a shoulder injury, Hollins was a lethal target for Marquise Williams and Mitch Trubisky, his speed giving defensive coordinators fits and opening things up for Switzer, Austin Proehl and T.J. Logan on short routes over the middle. All the while, he never surrendered his role in the kicking game.

"I'll never give that up," he said. "That's what got me here. I'll play special teams before I play receiver. That's my main focus."

And now on Sunday, Hollins will don his No. 10 Philadelphia Eagles jersey and play in the biggest game in football. When Hollins was drafted in the fourth round by the Eagles last April (his shoulder injury certainly affecting what could have/should have been a higher rung), his pal Vippolis tweeted, "Congratulations, Eagles, you just won the draft." The Hollins NFL template has been much like his evolution in Chapel Hill—he's found a niche on special teams, is showing promise as a receiver and is doing eccentric stuff like riding his bike to Lincoln Financial Stadium on game day. He had 16 catches during the regular season, one of them 64 yards for a touchdown, and made a nice block on LeGarrette Blount's touchdown run in the NFC title game against Minnesota.

"The second you meet him, you can tell he takes on that underdog personality," says Vippolis. "He's a perfect fit for the Eagles because they've had that same personality this year. He was told in high school he couldn't start. He had no college scholarship offers. He fell in the draft because of an injury. One thing after another, he just bounces back."

The Hollins family will be in U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on Sunday when the Eagles meet the Patriots in Super Bowl LII. Former Carolina teammates like Vippolis, Weiler and Coker will be scattered around the country, watching on television and wondering what their old buddy has in store for his next act.

Lee Pace just completed his 28th year covering Tar Heel football through "Extra Points" and 14th as the sideline reporter for the Tar Heel Sports Network. His book, "Football in a Forest," is available in bookstores across North Carolina and online at www.johnnytshirt.com. Email him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @LeePaceTweet.

Players Mentioned

Austin Proehl

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