University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: What, Me Sleep?
December 12, 2011 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Dec. 12, 2011
By Lee Pace
Attack, the man says. All right, then, attack this:
Southern Mississippi football on its own eight yard-line, time out between the first and second quarters in Charlottesville in September. Virginia leads, 13-7, trying to avenge its loss in Hattiesburg two years earlier. Southern Miss coach Larry Fedora and his staff know the Cavaliers tend to play inordinately soft to one side or the other if they have a return set up. Fedora tells his punter, Danny Hrapmann, he's got a green light if his pre-snap read is what Fedora thinks it might be.
The Golden Eagle punt team takes the field. Hrapmann stands eight yards deep in the end zone. Sure enough, Virginia special teams coordinator Anthony Poindexter has called for a return. The Cavaliers will give only scant attention to blocking the punt; the three players on the left side of their formation immediately drop back to set up the return.
And Hrapmann bolts scot free behind a wall of three blockers in the Eagles' shield formation all the way to the 39 yard-line. The official gain is 31 yards, but given the depth of his start and the angle of the run, Hrapmann runs more than 50 yards. From eight yards deep in the end zone. Southern Miss goes on to score the go-ahead touchdown moments later and never trails again in posting a 30-24 win over Virginia, a team that will later challenge for the ACC Coastal Division title.
"It's obviously a calculated risk," Fedora said after the game. "If you're on your own eight and it doesn't work out, you'd all be calling me a goat right now."¬¬
"To their credit, they had the courage to run it," Poindexter said.
No wonder Larry Fedora's eyes twinkled just a wee bit Friday when he talked about his style of football, the style Tar Heel fans will come to know beginning in September 2012.
"You can count on game-changing plays in special teams," he said.
And this: "You'd better buckle your seat belt."
And this, citing General George Patton: "Attack constantly, vigorously and viciously. Never let up."
The kinetic, high-energy Fedora was introduced Friday as Carolina's 35th head football coach, replacing Everett Withers, who has served five months on an interim basis following the July dismissal of Butch Davis. Fedora will coach his Golden Eagles in a Hawaiian bowl game on Dec. 24, then move to Chapel Hill to begin the process of recruiting, hiring a staff, finding a place to live, mapping out donor and fan relations initiatives, establishing a base with the academic community and in general getting the lay of the land of Tar Heel football. There is obviously much to do.
"Give me one good night of sleep a week and a lot of Red Bull, and I'm ready to go," Fedora says.
***
Larry Fedora walked into a hospitality suite in the Affinia 50 Hotel in midtown Manhattan on Monday morning, Dec. 5, and was greeted by new Carolina Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham, a team of senior associates from Chapel Hill and a consultant from Gainesville, Fla. New York is the venue in early December for the National Football Foundation's annual awards and hall of fame banquet and draws coaches and administrators from across the nation for two days, providing the Carolina contingent a nexus to take what had begun weeks earlier as a master list of some 75 names and further whittle it to a manageable number for serious consideration.
Fedora wore a suit and tie and carried with him two three-ring binders. One binder included facts, figures and graphics outlining his style of football, his accomplishments in 22 years and six stops in college football. Another encompassed the recruiting operation he would oversee specifically for the University of North Carolina.
He presented a sheet with some three dozen names of potential assistant coaches.
He talked recruiting, that he wants to own the state of North Carolina first, then branch out.
He talked season ticket sales and said he'd want to see Carolina officials set a goal higher for 2012 than ever before.
He talked offensive philosophy and stressed that no-huddle and fast-tempo are well and good but you've got to be physical enough to run the ball successfully--not only for balance but, perhaps most importantly, so that your own defense can cut its teeth during spring and preseason camp against a power team.
Over their two-and-half-hour meeting, images of two successful Tar Heel head coaches popped into the heads of at least two in the room.
Rick Steinbacher, associate athletic director for marketing, thought of his coach when he was a Tar Heel linebacker from 1990-93.
"I felt like I did being recruited by Mack Brown," Steinbacher says. "Coach Fedora has that intensity and energy and passion that Coach Brown has. Coach Fedora has an unbelievably positive outlook on everything."
And John Montgomery, executive director of the Rams Club, thought of the incumbent Carolina basketball coach, Roy Williams.
"I didn't work with Mack, but I could see parallels with Roy," says Montgomery, who came to Carolina in 2001. "Both learned the value of hard work at very early ages, both are intense, high energy guys. And both are down-to-earth guys, the kind you can reach out and touch."
Cunningham and his team visited with other coaches the rest of the day and evening; they filled out review forms on each candidate, rating him in a variety of categories. They slept on the day's proceedings. The group re-convened Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. The consensus was that Fedora was their guy. The rest of the day and night--with breaks only for lunch and the College Football Hall of Fame banquet that night--consisted of working out the arrangements and logistics. Cunningham spent a couple of hours privately with Fedora, and the UNC group adjourned at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, the deal essentially done.
"Larry is very enthusiastic, he has an infectious personality," Cunningham says. "You are immediately attracted to what he has to say. He had obviously put a lot of time and preparation into our meeting. He had a plan for every aspect of the program. As we went through the next couple of days, we tried to keep an open mind and make sure we completed the process. But there's no question, it was clear from the beginning that Larry would be a very good fit for us. "
Cunningham's conversation with Fedora on Tuesday included frank talk about the pending NCAA ruling. The institution has spent considerable time and resources answering the NCAA's findings and penalizing itself to the degree others in similar situations have been penalized--two years of vacated wins, nine scholarship cuts over three years, two years NCAA probation, a $50,000 fine. But there are no guarantees.
"Bubba made sure I was coming in with my eyes open," Fedora says. "I appreciate that. I really do appreciate him being very forthcoming about everything about the University of North Carolina. He made me aware of everything. It does not scare me. With any kind of adversity, you look it in the eye, you grab it by the throat, then you choke it. That's what you do. That's what we will do with any adversity that comes up, now or in the future."
For all of the talk about Fedora's spread, no-huddle attack that conjures images of Cirque du Soleil on grass, understand that the Eagles have run the ball exceptionally well--averaging 192 yards a game, 181, 201 and 208 respectively over his four years at Southern Miss. Combining the ground and air attacks, Fedora's teams at Southern Miss averaged 443 yards of offense per game. In his final two years running Oklahoma State's offense in 2006-07, his units notched 448 yards a game, half on the ground, half in the air. In one game against Texas, the Cowboys had 594 yards offense and scored 35 points--but lost to the Longhorns, 38-35. Last year in the Beef `O' Brady's Bowl, Southern Miss scored on a wide receiver-to-quarterback throwback.
"Ultimately the goal is to win," Cunningham says. "If how you get there is an entertaining style of play, that's a bonus. Larry talked about some spread teams having trouble on defense, that they're perceived as soft and particularly so in the red zone. He wants a tough team. I think his team's style is reflected in his personality."
Fedora told Cunningham et al of his team's friskiness on special teams and one in the group wrote on his notepad, "Beamer-ball," harkening to the ability of Frank Beamer's Virginia Tech teams to wreak havoc in the kicking game.
Southern Miss ran an onside kick against Alabama-Birmingham in the first quarter and a fake field goal for a touchdown in the same game. The Eagles scored four non-offensive touchdowns in their win over East Carolina--two interceptions, a blocked punt returned for a touchdown and a punt return. In its 49-28 dismantling of seventh-ranked Houston Dec. 3 in the Conference USA championship, Southern Miss blocked a Houston punt, scooped it up and returned it for a touchdown. The Eagles blocked six punts over two years and had 18 non-offensive touchdowns in Fedora's four years.
The issue of defense prompts an interesting "what-goes-around-comes-around" element between Fedora, Southern Miss and Carolina. One of Bill Dooley's early lieutenants in Chapel Hill in the late 1960s was a defensive line coach named Jim Carmody, who everyone called "Maddog" because, well, let's just say you had to be there. Carmody left Chapel Hill after a few years and later joined another former Tar Heel assistant, Bobby Collins, at Southern Miss. As defensive coordinator at Southern Miss under Collins and later as head coach in the 1980s, Carmody was known as "Big Nasty."
Maddog, Big Nasty--six of one, half dozen of the other.
The "Big Nasty" moniker stuck and was applied to Golden Eagle defenses throughout the next three decades, sometimes with more accuracy than others.
"It's blue-collar, smack-you-in-the mouth defense," Fedora says. "That's the tradition here."
Aggravated after the 2010 season that his team lost to Tulsa 56-50, East Carolina 44-43 and UAB 50-49, Fedora hired an old coaching friend away from Illinois and new coordinator Dan Disch installed a 4-2-5 scheme for the 2011 season and re-established the "Nasty Bunch" theme. The team went from allowing 29.54 points a game in 2010 (81st nationally) to 21 points this year (29th nationally). In winning the Conference USA title over Houston, Southern Miss pressured Houston QB Case Keenum as never before and did it for the most part with its front four. Keenum had thrown three interceptions in 11 games; he threw two against Southern Miss. Houston had averaged 7.7 yards a snap through 12 games; the "Nasty Bunch" stopped them to 4.4 yards a snap.
"I didn't think Keenum ever looked comfortable," Fedora said. "We got after him from start to finish. We played with a chip on our shoulders. We played physical and our defense dominated."
Of course, schemes are worthless without good players. On the recruiting front, Fedora impressed his audience in New York last week and a bigger group upon his introduction in Chapel Hill on Friday that he has the bona fides to run a productive operation--using his drive and personality at the lead augmented by assistants who better know the nuances of recruiting North Carolina and the mid-Atlantic.
"It does not matter where you recruit," Fedora says. "Good recruiters can recruit anywhere. Recruiting is hard work. Building relationships what it's all about. You can outwork people in recruiting. When you have a tremendous product and a national brand, there aren't many homes that you cannot get into."
It helps when those not of the Carolina blue persuasion lend credence to all the warm-and-fuzzies that Fedora sprinkled about on Friday.
"Fedora's aggressive, has a sharp offensive mind and really keen eye for talent," says Bruce Feldman of CBS Sports. "That last part is big. He helped land some very unheralded prospects at Oklahoma State who blossomed into stars."
"Southern Miss has really shocked the recruiting world," Scout.com's Allen Wallace said of a recent Golden Eagles signing class.
Fedora finished his whirlwind week on Friday by meeting with the current Tar Heel players and imploring them to finish the year with an eighth win in their Shreveport bowl. He left for a return flight to Hattiesburg Friday night armed with DVD highlights and phone numbers of the current Carolina recruiting list. Then he had football practice on Saturday for his Southern Miss team. Odds are that Larry Fedora's a master at squeezing every drop from a 24-hour window of time.
Lee Pace is in his 22nd season writing "Extra Points" and eighth covering Carolina games on the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network. He and the network crew address your questions about the Tar Heels each week on the pregame show; you can email them to asktheheels@gmail.com.
