Extra Points: Spring Forth

By Lee Pace

Carolina's football team embarked on spring practice thirty years ago having lost four senior offensive linemen and a 1,000-yard rusher from the previous team. For the first week, the offense ran only four plays—the sweep, sprint draw, the belly and the counter—and the defense was restricted from blitzing or disguising coverages, just to give the offense a whisker of breathing room. After one scrimmage, John Swofford, then the Tar Heels' athletic director, half smirked to Mack Brown, then the second-year head coach, "You sure like that sweep, don't you?"

Brown could laugh about it later. "I was trying to find something so we could just gain a yard," Brown said.

There are no such problems in round two of Brown's running the football ship in Chapel Hill. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The Tar Heels have a trio of talented, albeit young and inexperienced, quarterbacks leading the offense. They have a vault of good skill players and the nucleus of a good line. And they have a new coordinator and scheme in Phil Longo's version of the Air Raid that led the nation among FCS teams in 2015 in offense with 531 yards a game.

The challenge as Brown wraps up his first spring practice in his second iteration as the Tar Heels' coach is to bring both the offense and defense along at a complementary pace. Carolina could be quite good on offense. But defense is another matter with the formidable task of building depth in the front wall and linebacking corps.

"You've got to be careful nowadays that offenses and defenses are going so fast that people aren't teaching fundamentals," Brown says. "Fundamentals are really important, not just going fast. With our offense, we have the ability to go slow. Because three-and-outs when you're thin on defense and you're playing against a tempo offense is a disaster. You don't need three-and-outs fast."

Brown was clearly facing a rebuilding task in 1988 and '89, starting from scratch in 1988 on defense and then losing everyone from a ground-oriented but quite productive offense from '88 going into '89. The lopsidedness of one side of the ball to the other resulted in those infamous back-to-back 1-and-10s when Brown was assembling the foundation to what would become six straight bowl teams and back-to-back Top-10 finishes in 1996-97.

It's not nearly so dismal today. Indeed, the Tar Heels have won just five games in two years, but with a few less injuries than the 2017 and '18 squads endured … a little luck and a little momentum building throughout the season … a handful of newcomers who develop quickly … a quarterback who protects the football … it could all add to an abrupt turnaround.

"We're planning on winning fast," Brown says. "The response has been tremendous, and we're well on our way. These are nice kids and they are really trying hard for us. Our job is to give them hope and give them belief and confidence and then put them in the right places."

Brown and his team unveiled a few snippets of what they've been working on Saturday afternoon in a 75-minute scrimmage in Kenan Stadium that was the anchor event to a weekend that included the annual lettermen's reunion, two lacrosse games, tours of the new Indoor Practice Facility and a concert by the rapper Ricardo Valentine, better known by his stage name "6LACK."

The Tar Heel offering was hopefully just a shadow of what it will be on August 31 when Carolina meets South Carolina in Charlotte. A half dozen players missed all of spring practice with medical issues, and several more were nicked as spring evolved.

"We will be a much better team August 1 than we were today," Brown said. "We'll have some depth, and we'll just have to use a lot of young guys to create that depth. We've got some on offense. We have absolutely none on defense and that's a real concern. We've got to get in the weight room. We've got to get stronger."

Spring football games are seen in some quarters as wastes of what could be an otherwise productive practice session and in opposite corners as a bonding, public-relations and recruiting event. To Brown it is clearly the latter. He understood that a day and a half of incessant rain that dumped upwards of three inches on Chapel Hill and a dire forecast for all of Saturday discouraged some from coming out. But still, the appearance of several thousand fans is a place to build—something toward the kinds of crowds that regularly show up in April for exhibitions at Penn State, Alabama, Texas and Georgia.

"It's what I want," Brown says. "It's something that we're asking fans to do. We may have to win a few more games to get them out, but we're going to constantly talk to our fans."

The players enjoyed the game-like lead-up to the event and seeing their former teammates show up in droves. Marquise Williams, Landon Turner, Elijah Hood, Nazair Jones and M.J. Stewart—all starters on the 2015 ACC Coastal title team—were among some of the recent Tar Heels to populate the sidelines during pregame warm-ups.

"I love the spring game, feeling the excitement of the players," offensive tackle Charlie Heck said. "This is what we've worked for the entire spring, seeing the fans out there. Definitely there was a buzz, you can feel the energy. I was seeing lettermen here, recruits, everyone's super excited about Carolina football right now."

"There was a lot of support from our fans today, even though it was supposed to rain," added cornerback Patrice Rene. "So many of them coming out meant a lot to us. You could feel a great atmosphere. Guys are excited, people are happy, we're heading in the right direction. It was a fun time today."

As promised, quarterbacks Cade Fortin and Jace Ruder, both red-shirt freshmen, and Sam Howell, a January enrollee fresh out of high school in Monroe, shared snaps, each showing some flashes of passing ability and playmaking savvy. Ruder hit tight end Carl Tucker for 77 yards on one big play and Howell nailed Roscoe Johnson for a 42-yard TD on another.

Brown said the plan was for all three to share reps throughout spring as they learned the offense and that no decision would be made until August who would start the season opener.

"I told them the other day, 'All three of you are good enough, we would have recruited all three of you at Texas,'" Brown said. "We're really fortunate. They're all the same age, basically. The one who gets the ball into the end zone is the one who's going to play."

Now begins the spring/summer off-season: May recruiting and June camps for the coaches, exams and conditioning for the players. But first come the meetings the coaches will have beginning Monday as they dissect their personnel board and Brown addresses each player's name and pointedly asks his position coach:

"Who would you feel safe in an alley fight with? Who's going to compete? Who do you trust?" Brown asks.

Apt questions, indeed. Brown found good answers to those same questions in round one as the Tar Heels' coach. And befitting the team's just-christened motto of "Be The One," there are some 85 Tar Heels with the chance to show they're ready for that alley fight.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has been covering Tar Heel football with his "Extra Points" column since 1990 and in 2016 published the definitive history of Kenan Stadium, "Football in a Forest." Follow him @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

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