University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Attack All The Time
December 9, 2011 | Football, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Dec. 9, 2011
By Adam Lucas
As a child, young Larry Fedora had a revelation that will shape every Kenan Stadium gameday in 2012.
Larry was sitting on the floor watching a football game on television with his father, Herb. "We'd watch the last two minutes of a game or the last two minutes of a half, and I'd see the offense spread it out, throw it around and go up and down the field," Larry Fedora remembered Friday morning, two hours before he was officially introduced as Carolina's new football coach. "That made sense to me. And so I asked my dad, `Why can't you do that all the time?'"
Herb Fedora, a barber who is now semi-retired and lives in College Station, Texas, simply said, "You just can't."
But Larry Fedora wasn't convinced. Over the next 40 years, he built his football philosophy from that question. As a freshman in high school, he wrote down a goal--"I want to become a Division I football coach." He tucked the slip of paper in his FCA Bible, where it remains today.
His first opportunity to test his theories came at Middle Tennessee State, where he served as offensive coordinator and discovered that for once, his father might have been wrong: you could spread it out and throw it around for 60 minutes. That's the style he'll bring to Chapel Hill beginning as soon as he completes his job at Southern Miss, where he will coach the Golden Eagles in the Hawaii Bowl on Dec. 24.
"You're going to see a lot of excitement," Fedora said about the new Tar Heel philosophy. "You're going to see a lot of points scored. You're going to see a defense that flies around and makes you feel like there are 12 or 13 defenders out there, because they fly to the ball and hit. Special teams will be important to us, and you will see game-changing plays every week."
It's a departure for Carolina to import a current head coach who has already tested his system. Not since Mack Brown arrived prior to the 1988 season have the Tar Heels brought in a current head coach who was already coaching at the college level. Carl Torbush was promoted from defensive coordinator. John Bunting arrived from the NFL. Butch Davis had been out of college football for six seasons before he was hired at Carolina.
Fedora's coaching tenure at Southern Miss was valuable because it was another chance to refine his on-field philosophy. But it also was important management experience, a chance to have experiences you can only learn in the CEO chair. He'll arrive in Chapel Hill having already worked out some of the details first-time head coaches must learn. He's not a one-year wonder. He had the chance to implement a program and then build a program with what worked. He's frank in admitting to a learning curve at his prior job.
"What I learned is that I couldn't micro-manage things the way I wanted to," he says. "Early on at Southern Miss, that was very difficult for me and I spread myself too thin. I learned I had to hire good people and let them do their jobs. As I got comfortable with that idea and with the staff, we became a much more effective staff."
That staff includes some trusted friends and advisors. As he explored the opportunities available to him this offseason--including some very close to his heart--he contacted numerous friends in the coaching profession, including former Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry, Grant Teaff (president of the American Football Coaches Association), Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley, and Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder. But it was Brown, Carolina's head coach from 1988-1997, who provided some valuable first-hand advice on the potential in Chapel Hill.
"Coach Brown said, first of all, that Carolina meant great people," Fedora says. "He said there were great fans, and there would be an opportunity to recruit great players--players who come to the University of North Carolina and want a degree. That was important to me. Coach Brown was very excited, and felt like it was the right place for me at the right time."
It was--and still is--a busy hiring season in college football. Plum jobs were open, including the position at Texas A&M, where Fedora has close connections. But as he did his research into possible opportunities, he kept coming back to Chapel Hill, a place he'd never been prior to this week. As it turned out, he didn't have to visit to get promising feedback from the job search. The consensus among his associates was clear: Carolina was the right opportunity.
"North Carolina was the best job out there," he says. "It was the most attractive job to me. From the very beginning, when I found out the job was going to be open, I was extremely excited about the opportunity. Carolina football is ripe right now. It is ready to explode, and the people want it to explode."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter and Facebook.
