University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Line of Demarcation
February 5, 2009 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Feb. 5, 2009
- Signing Day Live! Central | Signee Roster | Blog
- Season Ticket Renewals
- Watch Signing Day Live! Show | Press Conference
- Butch Davis Signing Day Press Conference (.mp3)
- Watch Coach's Davis' Interview on CBS College Sports
- CBS College Sports Breaks Down UNC's Class (.mp3)
By Lee Pace
Extra Points
Exactly one year ago in this space we discussed the rich linebacker tradition of Tar Heel football, how this once-vaunted position had fallen on fallow times in recent years and how Butch Davis and his staff had their lasers aimed at restocking that cupboard to a degree that would make the Mike Mansfields and Buddy Currys and Brian Simmons of the past proud.
Consider now the case of the offensive line.
The seventies and eighties were certainly the glory years for Carolina offensive linemen, with seven Tar Heels landing first-team All-America honors--Ron Rusnak, Ken Huff, Ron Wooten, Dave Drechsler, Brian Blados, Harris Barton and Pat Crowley. From Robert Pratt being tabbed in the third round of the 1974 NFL draft through Brian Bollinger going in the same round in 1992, the Heels had 10 linemen taken in the first three rounds.
"The thing that hit the papers in those days was all the thousand-yard rushers," says Crowley, today a financial advisor in Winston-Salem. "Well, what's behind a great tailback? A decent offensive line. The string goes way back--you look at Harris Barton and Ron Wooten and Dave Drechsler and Brian Blados, all those guys. You kind of take it for granted until it's not there anymore. Then 17 years later, you're scratching your head and wondering, `What happened?'"
Indeed, since 1992 Carolina has had no picks in the first three rounds of the NFL draft and only two draft selections at all--Jeb Terry in round five in 2003 and Jason Brown in round four in 2004. Only Brown received so much as a whiff of All-America recognition. Center Jeff Saturday has been the most successful offensive line product, landing a free-agent contract with Indianapolis in 1998 and going on to a decade-long career protecting Peyton Manning.
The reasons for the demise are many, including a brief and ill-fated philosophy change at one interlude to focus on signing mostly defensive linemen and weeding out the less athletic ones for the offensive side of the ball. Lead balloon, for sure. Having six offensive line coaches over 17 years is not constructive, either. That's an average of 2.6 years per regime and is hardly enough time for a coach to spot a top prospect as a high school junior, recruit and sign him, let him evolve as a red-shirt freshman and then grow into a productive starter as an upperclassman. Bottom line: Carolina has simply not recruited and coached well at this position that toils in relative anonymity but is a hundred pound gorilla in factoring a team's won-loss record.
Hopefully for Carolina's fortunes, that's in the process of changing. The Tar Heels' signing class announced Wednesday features four offensive linemen that several years down the road could provide a nucleus to the kind of trademark O-lines the Heels used to enjoy. Overall, the class has gotten excellent reviews (the Tar Heels were ranked fourth in the country by Scout.com, eighth by Rivals.com and 11th by ESPN) and is strong at receiver and defensive back in addition to the offensive line.
"I may be wrong, but we felt like we hit the jackpot," offensive line coach Sam Pittman says of his quartet. "We got who we wanted. None of them are guys we took because we missed on someone else."
Adds Davis, "We had 75 to 100 guys on our board over the last year, and these four were in the elite names we looked at."
The Tar Heels signed three tackles in the 6-7 range--Brennan Williams, Travis Bond and David Collins. They added a center-guard in Johnnie Farms. Williams was an Army All-American Bowl competitor who picked a Tar Heel cap on national TV and was offered scholarships by three schools as a defensive lineman. Bond was serenaded with chants from Michigan fans on his official visit to Ann Arbor last fall. Farms could have gone to any school in the SEC and staved off a late thrust from Auburn. Collins is from a family of N.C. State alums but picked the Tar Heels in the spring of his junior year and thus waylaid a lot of recruiting hullabaloo.
"The thing I like most is they have some mean streak in them and they're tough," Pittman says. "If you are tough and athletic and have a good work ethic, you're almost unstoppable. All the potential in the world doesn't mean anything if you won't work, and I think all of these guys will."
"One of the things we really focused on was finding guys who love to finish," Davis says. "We didn't want a guy who just blocks his guy and holds him for a second and allows the quarterback or ball carrier to finish the play. We wanted guys who moved their man totally out of the frame--to where you couldn't see him any more as you were watching film. We wanted guys who would block their guy and then go look for someone else to hit. I think we found those guys."
The offensive line is certainly a different culture within the domain of a football team. Rarely do true freshmen make an impact, so don't expect any significant contributions soon from this foursome. It's a unit where, with experience and time together, the sum of the parts can exceed the individual skills of the players. They are certainly not playing football for individual glory; in fact, if their names are not called during a game, they're probably playing well. Good O-lines develop their personalities and trademarks--from the Green Bay Packer lines of the late-1960s to the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s to the Washington Redskins of the 1980s.
"When you think of great offensive lines, you think of `The Hogs,'" offensive coordinator John Shoop says of the vaunted Redskins units of the Joe Gibbs era. "I don't think of Anthony Munoz but I think of Max Montoya and Blair Bush next to him. I think of growing up watching the Steelers trap all day long with Steve Courson and Mike Webster and Jon Kolb. Denver had it going with Tom Nalen and Matt Lepsis in '04 and '05--those guys had their own identity where they wouldn't talk to the press.
"You hope these guys will develop their own identity. I'd like for it to be pretty doggone physical and nasty and guys who like to finish plays. There's nothing soft about the O-line. Our morale is never higher on the O-line than when we're running the ball well."
Pittman played defense in high school and college but found a niche with the O-line early in his coaching career and has coached it at eight different universities--including Oklahoma and Kansas. He likes the idea of molding kids from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and different parts of the country into a cohesive unit.
"If you are thin-skinned, you can't play the offensive line and you can't coach it," Pittman says. "It's kind of an `us-against-the-world' mentality. If a back rushes for 150 to 200 yards, he's a great back. But if he rushes for 50 yards, the line is terrible. Who do we get? We get smart kids ... great work ethics ....momma's boys .... and guys who a pat on the back means as much as a headline on the sports page."
Crowley by his own admission brought a modest athletic resume to Carolina from his home in Hampton Bays, N.Y., in 1985. But he was blessed with heart and passion and had excellent coaching from Bill Stewart, who went on to become the head coach at West Virginia. Crowley wound up being a three-time All-ACC pick at guard.
"For the offensive line, you need to have some tough guys," Crowley says. "I was not a very good athlete. You could say I was a bad athlete. There was no other position on the field I could have played. But I was strong and I was tough and I was mean. That was my M.O."
That formula sounds like it fits the incoming cadre of blockers.
Collins (6-8, 300) comes from East Forsyth High in Kernersville. He lost some 50 pounds between his junior and senior seasons and was more agile and had more endurance as a senior, when he accounted for 60 pancake blocks and didn't allow a sack.
"David would have gotten more offers had he not committed so early," says Pittman. "We were in the mix early. I liked him and the fact I thought he would be a great worker. You can see on film how much he loves to finish plays. He improved an unbelievable amount from his junior to senior year."
Bond is from Bertie High in Winsdor, N.C., measures 6-7, 320 pounds and was ranked as the No. 17 offensive lineman in the nation by ESPN.com. He had offers from Michigan, Maryland, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, among others, and was coached in high school by former Tar Heel Tony Hoggard, a letterman in 1990.
"He is very athletic for a big guy," Pittman says. "He's the kind of kid who asks a zillion questions, and he's smart enough and athletic enough to put the answers to use. He wants to be great. He wants to be something special. I think he can be."
Williams (6-7, 285) played at Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, Mass., and was ranked in the top 10 nationally among offensive linemen by SuperPrep and Rivals. He comes from good football stock, his father Brent playing a decade in the NFL with the Patriots, Seahawks and Jets. Williams has a black belt in taekwondo, vouching for his flexibility and dexterity.
"Florida, Notre Dame and Virginia offered him as a defensive lineman," Pittman says. "That speaks to his athleticism. We put together blocking clips of him for our website, but we could show you unbelievable clips of him on defense. He's a 6-7 kid but he moves like he's 6-0."
Farms (6-3, 300) played at Perry High in south Georgia and was named SuperPrep All-America and ranked No. 16 at his position in nation. He originally committed to South Carolina but switched to Carolina after visiting for the N.C. State game in November. He had the Tar Heel staff chewing its nails with a last-minute visit to Auburn, but in the end Farms and his entire family--a total of seven came to Chapel Hill in November--felt most comfortable with the Tar Heels.
"We sweated a little bit, but it's called recruiting," Pittman says. "Sometimes you have to go out and fight for a kid. And he was worth fighting for. He was as highly recruited as anyone in the country at his position."
The Tar Heels lose two starters from last year's blocking front and expect Jonathan Cooper, a signee last February from Wilmington, to be one of the upcoming standouts. Cooper was the only signee at the position last year after taking four the previous year in the transition class from John Bunting to Davis. This was essentially the staff's first full-bore recruiting class with the advantage of having evaluated and recruited these players since their sophomore years in high school, and Pittman expects the program to sign about three linemen per year as the Tar Heels try to compliment what has become a prolific air game in the last decade with a consistent running attack.
"The only way we're going to win an ACC or a national championship is to be able to run the ball when we want to run it," Pittman says. "We don't necessarily have to run it when there are nine guys in the box, but you have to be able to run it when you want to run it."
Pittman looks at Carolina's 8-5 record in 2008 and notes that had the Tar Heels been able to sustain ball possession in the fourth quarter against Virginia Tech, Virginia and Maryland, those outcomes might have been different.
"There's no doubt we were better running the ball than we were a year ago," he says. "Still, in three of our four losses, if we had stayed on the field offensively at the end of the game, we'd have won those games. That's not to say it was all because we didn't run the ball well--there were some turnovers. But the bottom line is, if you stay on the field, you have the ball and they don't."
It will take several years, of course, to know if the optimism of today is well-founded. But if the Tar Heels can indeed rekindle that old O-line tradition, there's a lot to look forward to.
