Extra Points: Chizik Take Two

Gene Chizik left Chapel Hill in early February 2017 with a heady curriculum vitae of accomplishments in the world of coaching football. He was unbeaten with Auburn as defensive coordinator in 2004 and unbeaten with Texas the next year. He had two national title rings—from Texas in 2005 as an assistant to head coach Mack Brown and from Auburn in 2010 as head coach himself. He had stabilized the floundering defense at Carolina in 2015-16 and even picked up another championship ring—that from the Tar Heels' 2015 ACC Coastal Division title team.

And he chucked it all to the curb to return to Auburn, Alabama, to blend into the parental scene, tell a few dad jokes and follow his daughters to Mexico on spring break, proclaiming himself on Twitter as a "helicopter dad." It had bothered Chizik over three decades in the nomadic existence of a college football coach that his three children—daughters Kennedy and Landry and son Cally—could "tell you where they were born, but not where they are from." He promised them when the family moved from Ames, Iowa, where he had been head coach at Iowa State, to Auburn in 2009 that he'd never move them until they were finished with high school.

So Chizik worked for two years as a long-distance dad in 2015 and '16 directing the Tar Heel defense under head coach Larry Fedora. He missed his daughters' senior year of high school. He wasn't around when Cally cracked a vertebrae trying to make a tackle in preseason camp in 2016. Two years back in the game with the Tar Heels was enough. Dad wasn't going to miss his son's final two years of baseball and football.

Chizik went back to Auburn as soon as the National Signing Day for football was over in early February. That week he attended an Auburn High baseball game.

"I had no idea what parents do," he says. "I had no idea. It's embarrassing for me to say it, but I was completely ignorant of all the things parents do to make things happen for their kids and their football and baseball teams."

Over the next two years, Chizik flipped burgers at baseball games and was up at 5:30 a.m. on Friday football game days, working with another dad to plant Tiger flags on the school campus before the faculty or students arrived. He and his wife Jonna caravanned with other parents to road games and sat on the 50 yard-line at home games. Chizik listened as the parents around him cheered for the Tigers and their sons but also chirped about playing time and strategy.

"No, I was not a backseat play-caller," he says with a smile. "At least not audibly. Seriously, though, I was reminded of why I always told Jonna she should not sit in the stands when I was coaching. You hear a lot of stuff."

It culminated with Chizik posting a Tweet in November 2018 heralding the Friday Night Lights glory and the joy he'd gotten following his son and his teammates over two seasons. "Watching his team the last two years has been the best decision of my career," Chizik wrote in getting 12.3 thousand "likes" and 653 retweets. Various responders in his timeline asked him to come fix the various defenses at Oklahoma, Ole Miss and even back at Carolina.

"I loved every minute of it," he says.

Meanwhile, Chizik was freelancing with ESPN in its Southeastern Conference coverage and running the three Louie's Chicken franchises he'd purchased around Auburn. He'd always had a nose for business, beginning as a young coach to buy condos in towns where he worked and rent them out to students. A restauranteur and a coach have a lot in common—mess up and you'll hear about it on social media. The same values of structure, organization, attention to detail and customer relations are important.

At Auburn University, Chizik signed a lot of autographs after the Cam Newton-led team won the national title. At Louie's just east of campus, he'd wander around filling up tea glasses and making sure the tenders were crispy and burgers running juicy.

"We had great tenders and great catfish," he says. "We also had great cheeseburgers. I'm something of a foodie, and cheeseburgers are one of my favorites. You know, I look at someone a little funny if they don't love a cheeseburger."

It was all quite idyllic. And yet—once a coach, always a coach.

"I do miss the grind of coaching," he told an interviewer in August 2018. "I really love my life now, but if the perfect scenario came along, well, I'll never say never."

***

One interesting microcosm that helps illustrate the impact Gene Chizik might have on the operation of the Tar Heel defense on the dawn of the 2022 season is the two-year snippet of games against old nemesis Georgia Tech during Chizik's first run at Carolina in 2015-16. Coach Paul Johnson and his "flex-bone" offense gave the ACC Coastal Division in general and Carolina in particular absolute fits over the 11 years Johnson coached the Yellow Jackets. The Tar Heels were 4-7 versus Tech and averaged allowing 32 points a game over that span. Honing in on the 2012-14 stretch, the Tar Heels yielded an average of 542 yards a game and watched the Jackets load up with 69 points in 2012 and 43 in 2014.

Chizik adjusted the Tar Heels' front against Tech into a pure 4-3 base alignment with the tackles in the gap between the center and guard, the ends shading outside the tackles and the outside linebackers directly behind the ends or shaded to the outside, depending on the call. He positioned middle linebacker Jeff Schoettmer as a "centerfielder" of sorts, set seven yards back, also perhaps shaded a step in the direction of the call. This varied from earlier years when Schoettmer and a second linebacker were sitting behind the defensive ends with no one in the middle. The Tar Heels repped for Tech as far out as preseason camp, with the scout team running Tech's plays without a football—the point being for the Tar Heels to play assignment football and not worry about where the ball might be.

"The best way to beat Georgia Tech was the defensive line play," Schoettmer says. "They have to occupy the two blockers and not let the O-line climb and cut the knees at the second level. That's where our planning began when Coach Chizik came in."

Shakeel Rashad was a senior outside linebacker in 2015 and cites the benefits of working against a scout-team offense running plays without a football. It taught a meaningful lesson.

"The story of playing the triple-option is being disciplined," Rashad says. "They are always going to outnumber you. You have to be disciplined and not run around chasing where you think the ball is or where it's going. Practicing without a football emphasizes, 'Do your job, regardless.'"

The Tar Heels were 3-1 in non-league play to open the 2015 season when they traveled to Atlanta the first week in October. The first half on defense was not pretty, as the Yellow Jackets faked it here and tossed it there and darted to a 21-0 lead midway through the second quarter.

"The first half was not pretty," Schoettmer remembers. "Our eyes were all over the place."

Chizik's halftime address was one of the shortest on record. He thought part of the problem was simply adjusting to the speed of Tech's offense. There was no furious scrambling on the grease board. There was no kicking and screaming.

"We're not changing a thing," he said. "It's up to ya'll to execute what we've been working on forever. It's all about keeping your eyes where they belong, it's about physicality and beating the block in front of you. "

Tech would score only one touchdown the second half, and that came with the benefit of a short field after an unsuccessful onside kick attempt by the Tar Heels. The defense kept Tech out of the end zone inside the two yard-line on successive snaps to open the fourth quarter and then forced a turnover. The Tar Heels rallied to a 38-31 win that set them on a momentum track to win the ACC Coastal title.

Chizik used the foibles from the first half of that 2015 game as teaching and motivational fodder when Tech came to Chapel Hill the following year. The Friday before the game, he showed the defense 12 plays from the 2015 game and how lazy eyes turned into scads of Yellow Jacket yards and TDs. "Put your eyes on your people and forget about the ball," he reminded them.

The Tar Heels surrendered one big play in the first quarter, an 83-yard touchdown pass when cornerback M.J. Stewart tried to swipe the ball from the receiver's hands instead of locking up a tackle. Chizik from the booth upstairs and secondary coach Charlton Warren on the sideline spent the entire media timeout discussing an adjustment for a new formation they were seeing from Tech, "to get another hat on that side of the ball," as Warren later explained. Warren kneeled in front of his guys and told them, "We're good, no problem," and efficiently drew some Xs-and-Os on the grease board.

Calmness, precision, business-like demeanor. From that point, the Tar Heel defense allowed only 13 points in rolling to a 48-20 win—their second in a row over the Yellow Jackets. The defense yielded 12 explosive plays in 2015, just four a year later.

"Take those four plays away, and I'm pleased," Chizik said.

"Twenty points is a good day," Warren added. "But take those four lapses away, it could have been three or 10. That would have been special."

Add it up over two years vs. the Rambling Wreck: Two wins and six quarters allowing a total of 30 points after escaping that first half in 2015, all of it predicated on a blend of schematics, teaching, in-game adjustments and giving your players a sense of confidence that the plan would work.

Looking back today, Schoettmer and Rashad muse at what Chizik accomplished with those 2015-16 squads and compare the talent from then to now. Naz Jones and Stewart were the highlights from the two-deep in 2015 who went on productive careers in the NFL.

"Coach Chizik is so good teaching a 500-level football class and making it a 101 class," Schoettmer says. "He was so good at situational awareness. I'm excited to see what he can do with this level of talent. Beyond our top couple of guys, I'm not sure any of us would be in the top 12 of this roster."

Rashad says he would have been "looking around the locker room, trying to figure out which of these guys I'm going to play over. I would have tried to make a name for myself on special teams. If Coach Chizik can repeat what he did the first time with the guys they have now, it can be phenomenal."

***

In early January 2022, Mack Brown was in need of a new defensive coordinator. Gene and Jonna Chizik were empty-nesters, their daughters happily ensconced at Auburn and Cally a safety on the football team at Furman University. The stars were perfectly aligned, particularly when Brown was able to accommodate a request from Chizik that both say was not a deal-breaker but still was important to Chizik—let him hire Charlton Warren as his secondary coach.

"I always felt I might have one more coaching run left," Chizik says. "Mack Brown and North Carolina were the perfect fits I'd been looking for."

Not to mention that Chizik still got warm-and-fuzzies from the Charlie Justice statue in front of Kenan Football Center, remembering that his father, Gene Sr., was best friends growing up in Asheville with Justice's brother Bill, and they were in World War II at the same time and later played college football and coached and taught high school together in Clearwater, Fla.

"Pretty incredible, huh?" Chizik muses. "It's the circle of life. You never know where life is going to take you."

The Tar Heel defensive players in their first meeting with Chizik in January picked up the same vibe the players had sensed in 2015.

"He's a natural leader," linebacker Power Echols says. "He took command for sure. He came in and said this is how the defense is going to be run, this is the standard. When you go between those lines, this is the standard. We did a complete 180, it's like night and day."

"He has a presence and an aura about him," Schoettmer adds. "When he walks into a room, you can tell he's 'got it.'"

Chizik frequently harkens to the words of philosophers like Aristotle and Confucius, drawing on the latter's oft-quoted dictum that "Men's natures are alike. It's their habits that carry them far apart." If someone said something 2500 years ago, it has some staying power.

"It's exactly the same centuries later," Chizik says. "I pound that into our guys."

He talks about having the "capacity for boredom," that excellence flows from doing the mundane to perfection. He'll cite author Darren Hardy and his book, The Compound Effect, to further the idea that little things pile up into big ones—ergo the insignificant penny turning into more than $5 million if doubled each day over 30 days. He loves a photo of Muhammad Ali having just landed a knock-out blow to Sonny Liston, Ali snarling down at Liston, prone on the canvas.

"I show that picture to our defense all the time. That is a monumental mental tattoo for a defensive player," Chizik says. "If you're over an opponent like this, nothing else needs to be said. That's the standard."

Among the points of emphasis during spring ball and August training camp is improved communication, particularly in the back end, and constant preaching about the mandate to "find inches"—that perfect recognition, alignment and first steps put a player in position to make a tackle or snag an interception when being six inches late means the runner pops free. And he's trying to accomplish it all with relative simplicity and a belief that doing too many things on defense can "out-trick yourself."

"It's not about guru-ing all these defenses," Chizik says. "It's about striking blocks, getting off blocks, tackling in open space and forcing turnovers."

"I think the best coaches are the best simplifiers, and I think Coach Chizik has done that," end Kaimon Rucker says. "He's honed in on giving us a couple of plays a day. If all else fails, we're going to go with these couple of calls and we're going to run them and get good at them and dominate with them. That simplifying and honing-in on just a few calls has taken some stress off the defense and given us the ability to make plays."

It's just after noon in Chapel Hill and the thermometer is inching into the 90s. The Tar Heels have just finished their morning practice. As he is wont to do, Chizik seeks out various players of any and all positions on defense for a private conversation—what's good, what's bad or, worse, what's indifferent. This is three weeks of football overload-- practice, film breakdown, position meetings and staff meetings. And a lot of sweat.

Friday Night Lights and Louie's Chicken loom in the past.

"This is like riding a bike," Chizik says. "I love it. You just jump back on and start pedaling and don't worry about anything else."

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace enters his 33rd year writing features on the Carolina football program under the "Extra Points" banner. He is the author of "Football in a Forest" and reports from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network broadcasts. Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

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