University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Eight Ball
November 20, 2016 | Football, Featured Writers
By Lee Pace
Biblical scholars will tell you the number 8 signifies resurrection and regeneration, that it's the number of a new beginning. In ancient times, Pythagoras would have his students draw, look at, and meditate upon the number 8 as a way of invoking infinite abundance. Numerologists say it's the symbol of harmony and balance. The Beatles sang of Eight Days a Week. The number 8 is the atomic number for oxygen, there are 8 planets, a byte is 8 bits.
In other words, the number 8 rocks.
“Give it to 8,” Larry Fedora, who's wont to refer to players by their uniform numbers, has said more than once since 2013.
T.J. Logan has worn the number 8 since his high school days at Northern Guilford and now through nearly four seasons as a Tar Heel football player. His Twitter handle (@T_Ocho8) doubles up on the digit, with the Spanish version and the numeral itself.
Infinite abundance is certainly apropos when considering the career of Logan, who's now down to one home game left in Kenan Stadium, and even more evident following his contributions to the Tar Heels' workmanlike 41-7 pounding of The Citadel on a cold, blustery day in Kenan Stadium. Just when the crescendo of Where was Hood?!?!?!? and Give it to Hood!!!! caterwauling nears another, well, 8 on Richter Scale, here comes No. 8 with another monster game.
Logan made a remarkable one-handed snare of a Mitch Trubisky pass in the end zone for one touchdown early in the second quarter and then returned the opening kickoff of the second half 100 yards for another score. The return was the longest by a Tar Heel in the 89-year history of Kenan Stadium, with only two opponents having matched that distance. Logan now leads in career touchdowns on kickoff returns with four (moving ahead of Brandon Tate), and he bounded into fourth place in school history with 4,725 career all-purpose yards and is behind only Leon Johnson, Don McCauley and Amos Lawrence.
“T.J.'s been phenomenal for us, he's been the ultimate team player,” Fedora says. “When he's on the field, he's making plays in whatever we're asking him to do.”
The arrival of Elijah Hood at Carolina in January 2014 after his oft-chronicled recruiting saga (he switched from Notre Dame to Carolina in the 11th hour), legendary physical strength and a profile that ranked him somewhere on the larger-than-life scale between John Wayne, Godzilla and The Pope himself immediately ushered Logan to the back burner after only one season. And that was a freshman year, 2013, in which Logan was jostled from the gate by a knee injury in training camp. Still, he averaged nearly six yards a carry and returned two kickoffs for touchdowns.
“When Elijah came in, a lot of people forgot how good T.J. was coming out of high school,” fellow senior Ryan Switzer says. “If he had not gotten hurt our freshman year in training camp, he finishes that year with twelve or thirteen hundred yards as a freshman. The last six or seven games, be blew it up. He was little bit of the forgotten man, but not in our locker room because we see it every day. We know the kind of talent he has. He's one of most talented players I've ever played with.”
It didn't take Chris Kapilovic long to grasp that ability while recruiting Logan beginning in the spring of 2012. Kapilovic, the Tar Heels' offensive line coach with recruiting responsibilities in Guilford County, was wowed first by Logan's football skills—he rushed for 510-yards and eight touchdowns in the 2012 state title game win over Charlotte Catholic.
“To this day that is the most incredible performance I've ever seen,” Kapilovic says. “I figured out in a few minutes that night that my job had just gotten a lot harder. T.J. was already on everyone's radar, but this was going to go national. If they weren't coming after him hard already, they sure were now.”
Kapilovic was impressed just a few weeks later by Logan's overall athleticism and competitiveness on the basketball court.
“You transition to basketball season, he's the best player out there, too,” Kapilovic says. “And he was so competitive. You could tell he didn't treat it like some rec-league game.”
That Logan could win the state title in the 100-meters by bursting from a three-point stance and no starting blocks was yet another snippet to the athletic mosaic Logan was painting.
“I said, 'Man, if you'd get some blocks you'd dust everyone even more,'” Kapilovic says. “He said he just wasn't comfortable in them. But to run a 10.5 with no blocks? That's amazing.”
Equally impressive was Logan's demeanor, character and good manners (Fedora says he's never gotten a thank-you note from a recruit for a scholarship offer like he did from Logan). Those qualities would serve Logan well in the caldron of big-time football, where big fish from the high school pond are tossed into an ultra-competitive environment and some find they're nothing more than mere guppies.
“You saw that competitive fire in him, but he has no ego,” Kapilovic says. “It's all about his teammates and the offensive line opening the holes. He was never boastful. He never talked about his ability, but when it was time to compete, he did.”
While Hood missed spring practice in 2016 and was gradually working himself back to health during training camp, Logan was well-tuned physically and razor sharp mentally. The coaches and the strength and conditioning staff by consensus believed Logan's physical strength, raw speed, maturity and drive would hold him in terrific stead as the season evolved.
“T.J. made up his mind he wanted to have a great year,” running backs coach Larry Porter says. “He's had a lot of confidence going back to last year. He shows up on game day and feels like he's the best guy on the field.”
Porter lauds Logan's ability to meld the contrasting challenges of churning his knees high through tackles while keeping his pads low.
“You look at his toughness and his ability to make defenders miss and those are two things he's done so well this year,” Porter says. “He gets great knee-lift—he plows through arm-tackles. You look at how often the first guy tackles him, and it's not often. He gets a lot of yards-after-contact and broken tackles.”
Hood and Logan are remarkable in how they pull for one another. Both want the ball. Both want to play. But both want to win, and both realize that a productive Hood-Logan tandem is better than one going it alone. Logan joined his teammates in mobbing Hood on the sideline at Miami after Hood steamrolled the Hurricanes late in the game, and Hood several times Saturday mimicked with a laugh the one-arm reach Logan used to reel in his touchdown pass.
“I'm just trying to prove to people you don't have to be the main guy, you just have to be the guy who works hard,” Logan says. “That's what I did in spring ball, in training camp. Elijah and me complement each other well. I have never been bigger than the team. I thought if I kept my head down, stayed humble and kept working, it would pay off.”
Indeed it has. In just a few days, Logan will take the field at Kenan Stadium for the last time, joining fellow recruits from 2013 like Switzer, Des Lawrence, Bug Howard, Lucas Crowley, Mikey Bart, Khris Francis and Donnie Miles in a bittersweet “Where has the time gone?” moment before kickoff.
“T.J. always has a smile, comes to work every day and never pouts,” Kapilovic says. “If he doesn't get the ball, he's not pouting in the corner. He does everything he can to help this team. He's a joy to be around. He's a great example of what a teammate is supposed to be. There is not a better example out there than him.”
We have one more regular-season game to enjoy T.J. Logan, the eighth wonder of the Carolina football world.
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has covered Tar Heel football for 26 years through “Extra Points” and a dozen as the Tar Heel Sports Network's sideline reporter. He has just published a book on Kenan Stadium, “Football in a Forest.” Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and contact him at leepace7@gmail.com.
