University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points Thursday
October 18, 2001 | Football
Oct. 18, 2001
By Lee Pace
So what's so hard about defending Woody Dantzler and the Clemson Tigers? All you need are the following:
* Sedrick Hodge containing Dantzler on the flanks, staying at home on fake
to Dantzler early in last year's game with Clemson. |
* Julius Peppers shredding the offensive tackle, getting his hands into Dantzler's "window" and knocking passes to the ground.
* Nickel-back Kevin Knight leaving his wideout when the play is a sure run and crisply tackling Dantzler on the corner.
* Tackle Will Chapman fighting his blocker on a pass play, keeping track of Dantzler in his field of vision, and sliding off the block as Dantzler tries to slip past him on a scramble.
* An end like Malcolm Stewart furiously pass rushing to a depth of 10 yards, then having the energy and presence of mind to keep fighting and come back toward the line of scrimmage--just in case Dantzler might have been flushed from the pocket and is vulnerable from behind.
* Linebacker Brandon Spoon expertly reading a fake handoff from Dantzler to Travis Zachery, filling a hole, shucking a blocker and nailing Dantzler for a two-yard loss.
Dream city, you say?
Hardly. Those are real-life ball plays from the first quarter and a half of the Tar Heels' game against Clemson last October in Kenan Stadium. Carolina played expert defense, limiting Dantzler to 22 yards on eight carries and the Tigers to three first downs in four possessions.
Hodge and Spoon are no longer around, having taking their considerable skills to the NFL, but Quincy Monk and David Thornton have replaced them admirably and the surrounding cast is better than a year ago.
The message, which you can believe has already and will be again underlined to the Tar Heel defense, is that Dantzler can be reigned in. The Tar Heels proved that a year ago. Unfortunately for Carolina, Dantzler was injured, left the game and the Tigers adjusted their attack for QB Willie Simmons. They went to more of a downfield passing attacking, taking advantage of Carolina's man-to-man coverage in the secondary and receiver Rod Gardner's five-inch height advantage on cornerback Errol Hood.
"It will take a total team effort," safety Billy-Dee Greenwood says of Saturday's challenge at Death Valley. "Everyone's got to play assignment football, rally to the ball and tackle well. You cannot give him a second opportunity. If he gets out in space, he's extremely dangerous."
When starter Brandon Streeter was injured in the Tar Heels' game at Clemson two years ago, Dantzler replaced him and went on to gain more than 200 yards offense in a 31-20 Tiger win. Tar Heel coach Carl Torbush and his defensive staff knew they were in for a challenge the rest of the game.
"Dantzler's a whole lot like Leon Johnson playing quarterback," Torbush said of the former Tar Heel tailback. "We knew when Dantzler came in, we had a two-headed snake on our hands."
A call to former Tar Heel place kicker Clint Gwaltney last Sunday to discuss the nuances of the onside kick attempt (the Heels have had to field one at game's end each of the last two weeks) elicited the following interesting story from the archives.
Up until a rules change in college football at some point in the early to mid-1990s, teams were allowed to position their kick-off team players in any alignment across the
kicker from 1988-91. |
A key ingredient of that recovery attempt was to have designated players, usually half of the number you positioned to the recovery side the field, to act as blockers--to charge downfield 10 yards, not looking for the football but to knock potential kick fielders on their rear ends. The other players would look for the loose ball.
The combination of having so many players positioned on one side of the field and the ability to hit before the opposition could field the ball led to a lot of nasty pile-ups and two rules changes. One, at least four players must be positioned on each side of the kicker, restricting the overload to one side to six players. Two, kick-cover players cannot slam receiving team players before the fielding team has had a chance to catch the ball.
But back in 1989, Carolina was attempting to rally from behind to beat Wake Forest in Kenan Stadium. The Tar Heels had just scored to cut the Deacon lead to 17-16, and a two-point conversion attempt failed. So coach Mack Brown called for an onside kick attempt.
The Tar Heels lined up 10 players to the left side of the field. One of the regular kick-cover team members was hurt, so freshman Tommy Thigpen was rushed onto the unit at the last minute.
Thigpen believed his job was to slam one of the Deacons and keep him from getting the ball. So when Gwaltney launched his end-over-end grounder across the field, Thigpen zeroed in on his target, sprinted downfield and knocked the beejeebers out of him.
Gwaltney's kick was perfect. It swiveled along the ground on its axis and got the high, floating bounce that kickers practice for hours on end during the week.
Only problem was that Thigpen had gotten the assignment wrong. He was supposed to be one of the players looking for the football once it crossed the required 10 yards.
So when the ball just about hit Thigpen in the helmet, he wasn't looking for it. It fell to the ground and was covered by a Deacon. The game was over a couple of snaps later.
"I tried two onside kicks in my career," says Gwaltney, the Tar Heel kicker from 1988-91. "One was at Kentucky. It was raining and the ball was wet and it just squibbed out-of-bounds and no one recovered it. The other was the Wake Forest game."
Fortunately, Carolina has beaten Wake Forest 10 of the last 11 years and hasn't needed any more onside kick attempts.
You might have noticed the difference in compensation between Tar Heel basketball coach Matt Doherty and football coach contract between Carolina and Nike announced this week.
Doherty will receive $500,000, while Bunting will receive $75,000. It's not unusual for basketball coaches to receive significantly more than football coaches in the deals Nike structures across the country for one simple reason--selling basketball shoes to the public is much more important to the company than selling football shoes. Thus, Nike wants more of its marketing dollars in the sport of basketball.
Visit nike.com and you will find an entire sub-site devoted to basketball decorated with sophisticated downloads, wallpaper, screensavers, videos and view-from-all-angles images of shoes like the $160.00 Flightposite III.
There's no similar page for football. In fact, you have to do a search to even find football shoes. There are four models, each displayed with a small photograph and a dozen words of text.
Those are points, however, that former Tar Heel coach Mack Brown could not or would not grasp when considering a move to the University of Texas in December, 1997.
Brown was making a base salary of $165,375 in 1997 with estimated outside income boosting his total package to the $400,000 range. He later said it never bothered him that long-time basketball Dean Smith made significantly more money, but his close friends knew he was livid when he learned that first-year head basketball coach Bill Guthridge had a total compensation package nearly double that of Brown's.
But all the extra money in the package wasn't from their employer, the University of North Carolina. The extra money was from Nike.
So when Chancellor Michael Hooker told Athletic Director Dick Baddour to match any offer made by Texas (which had a total package of $750,000 on the table), the added money Carolina was offering would be coming from its own coffers.
In today's numbers, Carolina would have to boost Bunting's salary $425,000 out of its own budget to have his total package match Doherty's.
The issue, then, is not one of comparing basketball to football. The marketing dollars render it a true apples-to-oranges comparison.
The real issue as Bunting builds his program at Carolina will be one of making his package fair within the football coaching marketplace. There are at least a dozen head coaches across the country--Brown being one of them at Texas--that are paid at least a million a year.
If Bunting gets the Tar Heels back into the heady Top 10 hierarchy where Brown had them positioned in 1996 and 1997--and early indications are that he will do exactly that--Carolina will find the money. It won't come from Nike, but there are plenty of potential sources.
Treat Bunting fairly in accordance with the market and Carolina could have a long run with its current head coach. He much prefers college coaching to the NFL, and there's no Texas out on the landscape for the ex-Tar Heel linebacker.
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