Extra Points: Mask Out

By Lee Pace

The Tar Heel football team kicks off its 2020 spring practice regimen Tuesday with two major goals (build depth and improve special teams), two new assistant coaches (OLB/special teams coordinator Jovan Dewitt and tight ends coach John Lilly), a restocked personnel cupboard in the secondary, 13 January enrollees and a complete reboot in mindset and outlook.

I typed the paragraph above the morning of Thursday, March 12, to run in this space early the following week as Coach Mack Brown and his second Tar Heel football team were set to launch their spring practice regimen. The day before, Carolina Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz announced that students were being told to extend their spring break by seven days to allow campus health officials to wrap their arms around the Coronavirus pandemic that was gaining momentum worldwide, but at the moment spring practice was still set to begin.

As I worked, I was paying only cursory attention to the ACC Basketball Tournament, set to play four quarterfinal games that day in Greensboro. The Tar Heels had been eliminated the night before, so the games were low on my radar.

Then a Tweet at 12:15 stopped me dead in my keystrokes: The tournament had been cancelled, this domino falling just over 12 hours after the NBA suspended its season when two players had tested positive for Covid-19.

Brown was at his vacation home in the mountains, settling in to watch his friend Shaka Smart coach his University of Texas basketball team against Texas Tech in the Big XII Tournament.

"All of a sudden they take the teams off the floor," Brown says. "I'm thinking, 'What in the world's going on here?'"

And thus life as we knew it—to say nothing of the Tar Heels and their plans to build on a promising 7-6 season in Brown's first season back as the Carolina head coach—was flung into a black hole somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Never Never Land. Schools closed. Sports stopped. Travel was halted. We all retreated into our cocoons until further notice, communicating via Zoom, recreating via Netflix and shopping via Amazon.

"You'll look back on 2020 and tell your grandkids, 'You won't believe what we went through during the pandemic,'" Brown told his players on a video conference in late July. "We've never seen this before, and I hope we never do again.There's no playbook for this. The only choice we have is to be as smart as we can until we have a vaccine."

Nearly five months after that fateful March week, life is tip-toeing back to some semblance of normality. Students started returning to Chapel Hill this week with classes to resume under strict virus-control protocols. And the Tar Heels finally get back to the practice field on Thursday, though Brown and his coaches have been conducting NCAA-sanctioned conditioning and teaching sessions (no pads, no contact) for a few weeks.

And they finally saw a flicker at the end of a proverbial tunnel late the afternoon of July 29, when the ACC green-lighted the season and announced plans for a 10-game conference schedule, plus one non-league opponent per school.

"I've never seen a group of kids so excited as they were then," Brown says. "Now, we actually have a chance to play."

But the rules, certainly, are much different today—both on the field and away from it.

Players are living one to a dorm room, and meals and team meetings are held in the spacious Blue Zone on the east end of Kenan Stadium where the team can spread out, with no more than two players to a table. Players are scattered among three locker rooms on the west and east ends of Kenan Stadium. Individual position meeting rooms have been reorganized so that players will be properly spaced, and no more than two individuals can ride an elevator together in Kenan Football Center. Players, coaches and support staff are wearing masks at all times, and helmets have been outfitted with plastic shields for additional protection. The coaches and managers have six-foot poles to measure and reinforce social-distancing.

"They've said we can touch elbows and we're doing fake high-fives," Brown says in a lighter moment, then turns serious:

"All we can do is go by the guidelines. We can wear our masks like we're supposed to. We can wash our hands like we're supposed to. We can keep our distance like we're supposed to. I told the players the other day, 'Do I like wearing a mask?' I hate it. I don't like it all, but I'm wearing one most of my day. It doesn't matter. They're telling us if you want to be safe, wear it, and I want to be safe."

Getting intact to opening kick-off—whenever that might be, as the ACC has yet to set the schedule that will commence the week of Sept. 7-12—means playing by an odd set of rules. It means "internal leadership is more important than ever," as Brown says and it means players accepting that normal elements of college life might be off the table for 2020.

"We have talked to our kids at length about when the students come back and we have 19,000 students back on our campus," Brown says. "We have to create a bubble like the NBA's done. Our guys can't go to parties, they can't go to dinner. It's just different. You can decide whether you want to play or not. If you want to play football this year, it's up to you to make sure that we're healthy."

Mercifully on Thursday, we can get back to gnawing on football issues: How good can QB Sam Howell be as a sophomore? Who replaces Charlie Heck at left tackle? Who'll emerge along the defensive front? Are the freshmen as good as advertised? Will a transfer All-America kicker from Furman make a difference? And how about that rags to apparent riches story in the defensive backfield?

"I like walking around watching our team," Brown says. "I can walk out there and say, 'This is a good-looking team.' We've got a lot of good players out there. I couldn't say that a year ago. Now what we've got to do is develop some depth."

The most striking contrast anywhere on the team from one year to the next is certainly in the secondary. Brown ruefully tells the story of taking the field for the Duke game last October with only two cornerbacks, and one of them left the game on the first series. Now the Tar Heels have four players who started games in 2019 returning and are joined by Patrice Rene, Myles Wolfolk, Bryson Richardson and Cam'Ron Kelly, who are back from injuries. The group adds transfers Kyler McMichael (Clemson) and Bryce Watts (Virginia Tech) and highly regarded freshmen in Ja'Qurious Conley, Cameron Roseman-Sinclair and Tony Grimes, the latter of whom was originally a 2021 commit but, given the pandemic closing high school football in Virginia Beach, bumped ahead, graduated and enrolled in August.

"I really like what I see in the secondary," Brown says. "Last year we had a lot of injuries and no depth. It kept Coach Bateman from calling a lot of defenses and doing a lot of things he'd like to do. We just look a whole lot different. I think the secondary can be really special."

That the secondary was so thin and green helped create problems in special teams as well; defensive backs are archetypes for kicking teams given their speed, athleticism and tackling skills. But the Tar Heels were 83rd nationally in net punting, 85th in punt returns and missed two potential game-winning field goals. Brown believes that better depth and an overall reboot under new assistant coach Jovan Dewitt will give Carolina an edge over last fall. He says the Tar Heels were "okay" in the kicking game in 2019 and quickly adds, "In my position, you don't want to be okay in anything.

"We've pretty much given Jovan his choice of anyone he wants," Brown continues. "We'll have more depth and better players on special teams. To be a great team, you have to block some punts and score some points. We weren't a factor on punt returns at all, and we had a great punt returner in Dazz Newsome. I feel like we need to block more kicks, we need to return more punts. I never felt we were going to block a punt or return a punt. I never felt we presented a fear factor for anybody in those areas for anybody."

There was considerable buzz around the program in the spring of 2019 on anticipation of how Brown's second tenure as the Carolina coach might unfold. Today, that buzz is amplified with the reality of what's indeed happening—certainly augmented by a Top 20 signing class in 2020 and early results that peg the 2021 class among the nation's best.

"You want to have high expectations," Brown said back in March in anticipation of spring ball. "That's good. But we need to continue to have urgency, continue to have discipline and grow and get better. We cannot not sit back on our laurels and think, 'Wow, this is pretty cool, everyone's bragging on us, we got our respect back.

"We have to start over. This team has not beaten anyone."

That was the challenge back when Brown thought spring ball would start on March 17th. It remains so today—with a few more complications added to the mix.

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has written "Extra Points" since 1990 and been part of the Tar Heel Sports Network's broadcast team since 2004. He recognizes his customary spot along the sidelines is in serious jeopardy in 2020.

Players Mentioned

Ja'Qurious Conley

Tony Grimes

Charlie Heck

Sam Howell

Cam'Ron Kelly

Kyler McMichael

Dazz Newsome

Patrice Rene

Cameron Roseman-Sinclair

Bryce Watts

Myles Wolfolk

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