University of North Carolina Athletics
Countdown to Camp: Twenty Plays
June 16, 2005 | Football
June 16, 2005
Welcome to the first installment of TarHeelBlue.com's "Countdown to Camp" series. Every Thursday between now and the opening of training camp (which opens August 11), we'll have a fresh story on the football Tar Heels. If there's an aspect of the team or player you want to see highlighted, just drop us an email.
By Adam Lucas
The most important film watched during spring practice by Carolina's defense wasn't a highlight tape. It was a collection of plays the Tar Heel coaches and players never want to see again.
When Marvin Sanders gathered his defense for the first time before spring ball, he was staring at a group that had made significant progress over the final month of the season but still finished 109th nationally in total defense. He wanted to show them how close they had been to making the final statistics look very different.
He pulled 20 of the biggest plays opposing offenses made against the Heels in 2004. Three games made up the majority of the horror footage: Virginia, Florida State, and Utah.
The routine was simple: Sanders grabbed the remote. On the video screen, he waited for both teams to make it to the line of scrimmage. And then he began firing questions, Socratic style.
"At the beginning of each play, I'd ask a player what his responsibility was or what a coach had taught him to do in that situation," Sanders says. "I'd have him explain it to me in detail. Things like, `If you're the 3-technique defensive lineman and the offensive lineman goes with this zone blocking technique, what do you do?'
"Usually, they'd get it right. And then I'd roll the play and show them that they didn't do what they knew they were supposed to do. Then they'd see the crease unfold and the way the play was broken. We're trying to teach the importance of total concentration on every play."
Sanders, who served as co-defensive coordinator last year with John Gutekunst but has the sold responsibility for the defense in 2005, drew on his playing experience to teach concentration. At Nebraska, where he was a member of the Black Shirts defense before becoming the Huskers' secondary coach, the motto was simple: six seconds. That's the average length of a football play, and that's how long the Nebraska coaches required their players to focus.
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Countdown to Camp: 56 Days
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"Between the plays there's time to analyze what went on, the good and the bad things that happened," Sanders says. "But when that linebacker says, `Ready,' in the huddle, you focus completely on the next six seconds."
It didn't take long for the Tar Heels to understand the ramifications of lapses in focus. One missed assignment and a Virginia receiver was breaking into the open. One missed gap and a Florida State tailback was scampering for extra yardage. One lazy tackling effort and a Utah ballcarrier picked up an extra 15 yards.
For a defense that had spent most of preseason training camp drilling on the fundamentals of defensive play---solid tackling technique, fitting plays well, running hard to the ball--it was eye-opening.
"It was so simple it made you want to cry," defensive tackle Kyndraus Guy says. "One person failed. This summer, that's been our motto. On offense, one person can fail and the offense can still succeed. But on defense, if one person fails, we all failed."
They failed less frequently as the season progressed. The results were tangible: steadily improving team defense during a four-game stretch against Miami, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest and Duke at the end of the season.
The focus this summer has been on playing that type of defense for a full 12-game season---as players are quick to tell you, they're planning on a bowl---rather than just a small segment.
"We've seen the film," Guy says. "Take those plays away and we're a top 25 defense. That's inspirational. That's a beacon of light. And right now we're running toward the light."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and his book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about Going Home Again, click here.
