Extra Points: Round Trip

Before the Internet became mainstream in the mid-nineties, one of the best venues to talk sports and scarf up the latest recruiting news was Jeff's Campus Confectionery, the newsstand on Franklin Street known for its hand-made Coca-Colas and its back racks stocked with girly magazines. Most days during the height of the football recruiting campaign in December through early February, you could drop by Jeff's for a fountain drink and the latest morsels from Bob Osterneck, a rabid Tar Heel fan known for his generosity to the Rams Club and his Durham home with an in-ground pool shaped like a Tar Heel footprint.

"Jordy, you should see this tailback we had in last weekend!" Osterneck would chirp during the early days of the Mack Brown regime to the proprietor, Jordy Mousmoules. "This town's gonna be rockin' next fall if we get this kid!"

Sadly, Jeff's closed in November 1997, the victim of a landlord doubling the rent. That was also the month that Brown coached his last game in Chapel Hill before moving to Texas, leaving a program that had eight straight winning seasons; two straight Top 10 finishes; a 25-5 mark in Kenan Stadium over five years; five straight seasons of sweeping in-state rivals Duke, N.C. State and Wake Forest; and Brown with 69 career wins to tie him for most atop the school record.

Today Jeff's and Osterneck are long gone and sports fans devour their information on pocket-sized computers, and those devices are crackling with digital images of Brown during his encore chapter in Chapel Hill and the players he's assembled entering his third season. Nostalgia aside, Brown with 84 wins has moved into No. 1 all-time victories among Tar Heel coaches and has picked up where he left off a quarter of a century ago.

Quarterback Sam Howell in his No. 7 jersey are everywhere in the Twittersphere, preseason All-America lists and Heisman Trophy contender rosters. The Tar Heels are ranked No. 10 entering their opener Friday night at Virginia Tech and are the favorites to win the ACC Coastal Division title. Carolina's recruiting victories over the last two years are starting to pay off on defense, with the previously ultra-thin positions of interior line and secondary now stocked with fast, strong and savvy players.

Media pundits around the nation are buying in.

"The ACC's a coin flip for me," says ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit. "I think North Carolina is that close to competing with Clemson because of the job that Mack Brown has done in recruiting."

Adds Ari Wasserman in The Athletic: "North Carolina's rise is a problem for Clemson. That's how college football works. Reigns change, programs ascend, and programs fall. If North Carolina finishes the job and wins the ACC, the Tigers could really start to feel that. …The Tar Heels are involved with prospects who never would have considered them five years ago. That's how things change with the right head coach."

Facts, indeed. Carolina football for two decades has been on a roller coaster, with brief glimpses of the promised land under Butch Davis a dozen years ago and Larry Fedora in 2015-16. But Davis's regime ended for beyond-football reasons, and as prolific as the Marquise Williams and Mitch Trubisky led offenses were under Fedora, the Tar Heels have struggled on defense since that 2010 unit that was stocked with the likes of Bruce Carter, Quinton Coples, Kevin Reddick and Da'Norris Searcy.

Long-suffering Tar Heel fans finally have some substance to latch onto. Brown's debut season in his return to Chapel Hill in 2019 was the hors d'oeuvres—a kaleidoscope offense led by a freshman quarterback, a nail biter against Clemson, a home stadium bursting with fans and energy and a dominant bowl win. Year two was the salad course—eight wins amid the uncertainty and drama of Covid, further offensive fireworks, some seeds sprouting on defense and a total annihilation of Miami on the road.

Now, perhaps, the main course. The Tar Heels have Howell at grizzled veteran status, the biggest and most experienced offensive line in school history, an array of potential defense standouts and a trio of returning kickers. Many are wont to play the "yes but" game and look at the departure of four productive skill players on offense, but Brown's comfortable comparing those tailback and wide receivers positions to what he inherited two years ago. "We had some talented guys, but no one had stepped up and emerged," Brown says. "I look at those groups now and see a lot of potential."

Could this team equal or surpass the crests of Tar Heel football from the Justice days of the post-war 1940s, Bill Dooley's ACC title squads of the early 1970s and '77, Dick Crum's 1980 ACC title squad, or Brown's 1996-97 squads that were blemished only by the fact that Florida State was at the top of the college football universe at the time?

Who knows? But it will be a blast to find out.

"This year in Kenan Stadium is going to be absolutely electric," Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham says. "There couldn't be a better time to be a Tar Heel. We are so lucky Coach Brown decided to give up a cushy job in TV and come back here. He has an incredible staff, and they're recruiting like nobody's business."

Three years of productive recruiting has restocked the defensive roster. Of particular note is the hoarding of elite defensive linemen and edge players, the recruiting fruits over the last two years including Des Evans, Kedrick Bingley-Jones, Myles Murphy, Clyde Pinder Jr., Kaimon Rucker, Jahvaree Ritzie and Keeshawn Silver.

"We have more players now than when we got here, especially the front seven," defensive coordinator Jay Bateman says. "The front seven pieces are more physically aligned with what you need to compete."

Adds linebackers coach Tommy Thigpen: "The biggest difference now and the last two years is just girth and size on the line. We look like a premier team. We're long and athletic up front. It's one of the biggest D-lines I've ever been associated with. It's amazing how small the gaps are with their size and girth, how much congestion they create. We've got big guys on top of big guys. It makes our job as linebackers a whole lot easier when those gaps are small."

Brown is adamant as well that this team generate field position, points and momentum in the kicking game better than it has in two years. Grayson Atkins with field goals, Ben Kiernan with punts and Jonathan Kim with kick-offs bring experience and consistency, and the Tar Heels expect to have a roster deep enough to supply the kind of defensive-back/linebacker/receiver types needed to cover kicks and open lanes for the return specialists. With a new system in 2020, no spring practice and a handful of freshmen populating the kicking game, Carolina committed punting game errors against Florida State and Virginia that haunted them in close defeats.

"I think last year was the first in my years as a special teams coordinator we've not blocked a punt," special teams coordinator Jovan DeWitt says. "Blocked punts are massive changes in field position. I think everyone now understands how we approach it, how we attack and how we use our personnel."

"Kick returns and blocked punts—we've gotten nothing in two years," Brown adds. "We have not won any games on special teams. That's a problem we're committed to fixing."

The conjecture and pontificating come to a halt at 6 p.m. Friday in Lane Stadium in Blacksburg when Carolina and Virginia Tech face off in front of a national audience on ESPN. It's not been a friendly venue for the Tar Heels since the Hokies joined the ACC in 2004, with Carolina winning twice and dropping six. But Carolina has never played in Lane with quite the compliment of coaching and three phases of the ball as it has now.

"We have a window of opportunity right now to be really good," Brown says. "We've been good before and not so good. We've been great, been average, sometimes been bad. Right now, it's fun and it's exciting. The people we're recruiting against are on the national scene. We're right in the middle of it. It's a fight, it's a good fight, it's a fun fight."

Now, if we could just ditch these infernal phones and saunter back up to Jeff's on Franklin Street for a tongue wag and a syrupy Coke.

Chapel Hill based writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has written "Extra Points" since 1990, is the author of "Football in a Forest" and has been part of the Tar Heel Sports Network broadcast crew since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Grayson Atkins

Kedrick Bingley-Jones

Sam Howell

Ben Kiernan

Jonathan Kim

Myles Murphy

Jahvaree Ritzie

Kaimon Rucker

Keeshawn Silver

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