University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Hurry-Hurry
October 26, 2023 | Football
Bill Dooley grew up as an offensive lineman, played with his hand in the dirt at Mississippi State and believed as his coaching career evolved that "three things can happen when you throw the football—and two of them are bad." No wonder the Tar Heels during his tenure from 1967-77 were built around sturdy tailbacks like Don McCauley and Mike Voight.
Dick Crum came from the Midwest, where everyone worshipped at the alter of Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, and the Tar Heels during his reign from 1978-87 churned out more thousand-yard standouts like Amos Lawrence and Kelvin Bryant. Crum's offensive coordinator for half of that decade was Randy Walker, who later as a head coach at Miami (Ohio) and Northwestern said, "Put 12 guys out there on defense with butcher's knives, we're still gonna stick that puppy up in there."
The Tar Heels in the mid-1980s, however, had a catalyst for change. His name was Mark Maye.
"We got a glimpse of what might have been in 1987 at Georgia Tech," Crum reflects today. "That was a little of what we'd wanted to do for several years."
Maye came to Carolina in the fall of 1983 as a much ballyhooed quarterback from Charlotte, the Tar Heels beating Alabama at the final hour for his services. He wowed his teammates while being redshirted that year with a powerful arm that was also legendary in high school and American Legion baseball circles for delivering a lethal fastball. Crum and Walker planned to evolve the Tar Heels' foundation of that I-formation running game into a faster-paced attack that utilized three and four receivers and stretched the defense vertically. They even visited Steve Spurrier, at the time coaching the Tampa Bay Bandits with the USFL, for ideas on downfield passing routes.
"We wanted to take advantage of Mark's skill," Crum says. "He could throw the ball, he was extremely intelligent. He could look at a defense and if he had to make a choice, he could. We could give him a lot more leeway on the field than most quarterbacks. Mark had an ability to absorb that stuff. He could see things."
A typical Mark Maye summer day in the early 1980s might have him throwing hundreds of footballs at the Gus Purcell Quarterback Camp in Charlotte during the day and pitching an American Legion game that night. By the start of the 1984 football season, all the wear and tear rendered Maye with a right shoulder that an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles renowned for operating on major league baseball pitchers said "was like that of a 40-year-old pitcher." After surgery in January 1985, Maye had to rest his arm for a year, then worked his way back into the starting lineup midway through the 1986 season.
"If Mark's shoulder doesn't fall apart, the '84 and '85 seasons are completely different animals," says Daren Lucas, a high school quarterback from Clinton who played defensive back at Carolina during that period. "People say Crum was too conservative, wouldn't open it up. That's exactly what he planned to do in '84. When Mark came back, he was good. He was very good. He got plenty of accolades. But he wasn't quite the same. If ever there was a guy you wish hadn't gotten hurt, it was Mark Maye."
The early 1980s were a high-water mark in Carolina football history, with the Tar Heels winning the 1980 ACC title and beating national powers like Michigan, Texas and Arkansas in collecting four straight bowl games from 1979-82. They hiccupped with .500 records in 1984 and '85, bounced back with a 7-4-1 mark in 1986 and were poised with Maye at the helm in 1987 to contend with Clemson and Maryland for the ACC title.
They beat Illinois to open the season, then were thoroughly bounced on the road at Oklahoma in week two. The season hung in the balance at halftime the following Saturday in Atlanta, with Georgia Tech dominating the first half with a 20-3 lead.
"I told Randy at halftime I'm done screwing around, we're going to run the two-minute offense the whole second half," Crum says. "And we did. That was just a slight look at what we wanted to do, play fast. Mark was smart enough to handle it, it was just that his shoulder wouldn't handle it. Even after surgery, he got some pretty good blows to that shoulder."
They called it at the time their "Hurry-Hurry" offense. Maye had discretion to call the plays and run the offense, looking to the sideline if needed for input from Walker.
"We knew that Mark could handle it easily," Crum says. "The idea was to make it difficult for them to get in some of their different defensive alignments and substitutions. Mark could check off at the line of scrimmage and run any play he wanted. He made some excellent calls to get us going."
On third-and-five at the Carolina seven midway through the third quarter, Maye hit Randy Marriott in full stride deep down the middle. He caught the ball and outran Tech's defender for a 93-yard touchdown. The powder keg went off. In a span of six minutes and the Tar Heels in hurry-hurry mode, Maye led the Tar Heels on drives of 59, 78 and 34 yards and went from 13 down to seven up.
"The thing we told Mark was, if he got in a rhythm, to just go for it, " Walker said. "And oh boy, did he get into a rhythm."
Carolina escaped Atlanta with a 30-23 win, outscoring Tech 27-3 in the final 18 minutes of the game. Maye finished with a school-record 420 yards of total offense, completing 23-of-38 passes for 406 yards. Marriott had nine catches for a Carolina-record 247 yards and three touchdowns. Maye would end the season throwing for a school single-season record of 1,965 yards, but sadly the Tar Heels stumbled down the stretch with losses to Clemson, Virginia and Duke to finish 5-6.
"We thought with Mark we could play the no-huddle stuff, spread it out, and he could be like a coach on the field," says Crum, today retired and living in his native Ohio. "We were really heavily run-oriented. We were basically two tight ends and run the ball at them. But the game was starting to change some, you can see what it has become now.
"Randy Walker later as head coach at Northwestern did a lot of the things we talked about. It was not the exact offense, but it had the earmarks of it. It just didn't evolve for us quite like we'd hoped. It's probably more interesting than when we were there. They use the whole field, get a lot of skill players involved. It's a better game for the fans to watch."
How ironic that Mark Maye provided a brief glimpse of football's future that day in Atlanta 36 years ago. He left Carolina, flirted with the NFL and college coaching, then went into the financial services industry and started a family. His youngest son Drake has twice passed his old man with single-game passing totals of 448 yards vs. Wake Forest in 2022 and Syracuse with 442 in 2023.
"I loved that offense, we had great fun with it," Mark says. "But it was a different game back then, it wasn't as quarterback driven as it is now. We got hot that one day. Those are the ones you like to remember."
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) is in his 34th season writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner. Look for his columns throughout the season. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.
Dick Crum came from the Midwest, where everyone worshipped at the alter of Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, and the Tar Heels during his reign from 1978-87 churned out more thousand-yard standouts like Amos Lawrence and Kelvin Bryant. Crum's offensive coordinator for half of that decade was Randy Walker, who later as a head coach at Miami (Ohio) and Northwestern said, "Put 12 guys out there on defense with butcher's knives, we're still gonna stick that puppy up in there."
The Tar Heels in the mid-1980s, however, had a catalyst for change. His name was Mark Maye.
"We got a glimpse of what might have been in 1987 at Georgia Tech," Crum reflects today. "That was a little of what we'd wanted to do for several years."
Maye came to Carolina in the fall of 1983 as a much ballyhooed quarterback from Charlotte, the Tar Heels beating Alabama at the final hour for his services. He wowed his teammates while being redshirted that year with a powerful arm that was also legendary in high school and American Legion baseball circles for delivering a lethal fastball. Crum and Walker planned to evolve the Tar Heels' foundation of that I-formation running game into a faster-paced attack that utilized three and four receivers and stretched the defense vertically. They even visited Steve Spurrier, at the time coaching the Tampa Bay Bandits with the USFL, for ideas on downfield passing routes.
"We wanted to take advantage of Mark's skill," Crum says. "He could throw the ball, he was extremely intelligent. He could look at a defense and if he had to make a choice, he could. We could give him a lot more leeway on the field than most quarterbacks. Mark had an ability to absorb that stuff. He could see things."
A typical Mark Maye summer day in the early 1980s might have him throwing hundreds of footballs at the Gus Purcell Quarterback Camp in Charlotte during the day and pitching an American Legion game that night. By the start of the 1984 football season, all the wear and tear rendered Maye with a right shoulder that an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles renowned for operating on major league baseball pitchers said "was like that of a 40-year-old pitcher." After surgery in January 1985, Maye had to rest his arm for a year, then worked his way back into the starting lineup midway through the 1986 season.
"If Mark's shoulder doesn't fall apart, the '84 and '85 seasons are completely different animals," says Daren Lucas, a high school quarterback from Clinton who played defensive back at Carolina during that period. "People say Crum was too conservative, wouldn't open it up. That's exactly what he planned to do in '84. When Mark came back, he was good. He was very good. He got plenty of accolades. But he wasn't quite the same. If ever there was a guy you wish hadn't gotten hurt, it was Mark Maye."
The early 1980s were a high-water mark in Carolina football history, with the Tar Heels winning the 1980 ACC title and beating national powers like Michigan, Texas and Arkansas in collecting four straight bowl games from 1979-82. They hiccupped with .500 records in 1984 and '85, bounced back with a 7-4-1 mark in 1986 and were poised with Maye at the helm in 1987 to contend with Clemson and Maryland for the ACC title.
They beat Illinois to open the season, then were thoroughly bounced on the road at Oklahoma in week two. The season hung in the balance at halftime the following Saturday in Atlanta, with Georgia Tech dominating the first half with a 20-3 lead.
"I told Randy at halftime I'm done screwing around, we're going to run the two-minute offense the whole second half," Crum says. "And we did. That was just a slight look at what we wanted to do, play fast. Mark was smart enough to handle it, it was just that his shoulder wouldn't handle it. Even after surgery, he got some pretty good blows to that shoulder."
They called it at the time their "Hurry-Hurry" offense. Maye had discretion to call the plays and run the offense, looking to the sideline if needed for input from Walker.
"We knew that Mark could handle it easily," Crum says. "The idea was to make it difficult for them to get in some of their different defensive alignments and substitutions. Mark could check off at the line of scrimmage and run any play he wanted. He made some excellent calls to get us going."
On third-and-five at the Carolina seven midway through the third quarter, Maye hit Randy Marriott in full stride deep down the middle. He caught the ball and outran Tech's defender for a 93-yard touchdown. The powder keg went off. In a span of six minutes and the Tar Heels in hurry-hurry mode, Maye led the Tar Heels on drives of 59, 78 and 34 yards and went from 13 down to seven up.
"The thing we told Mark was, if he got in a rhythm, to just go for it, " Walker said. "And oh boy, did he get into a rhythm."
Carolina escaped Atlanta with a 30-23 win, outscoring Tech 27-3 in the final 18 minutes of the game. Maye finished with a school-record 420 yards of total offense, completing 23-of-38 passes for 406 yards. Marriott had nine catches for a Carolina-record 247 yards and three touchdowns. Maye would end the season throwing for a school single-season record of 1,965 yards, but sadly the Tar Heels stumbled down the stretch with losses to Clemson, Virginia and Duke to finish 5-6.
"We thought with Mark we could play the no-huddle stuff, spread it out, and he could be like a coach on the field," says Crum, today retired and living in his native Ohio. "We were really heavily run-oriented. We were basically two tight ends and run the ball at them. But the game was starting to change some, you can see what it has become now.
"Randy Walker later as head coach at Northwestern did a lot of the things we talked about. It was not the exact offense, but it had the earmarks of it. It just didn't evolve for us quite like we'd hoped. It's probably more interesting than when we were there. They use the whole field, get a lot of skill players involved. It's a better game for the fans to watch."
How ironic that Mark Maye provided a brief glimpse of football's future that day in Atlanta 36 years ago. He left Carolina, flirted with the NFL and college coaching, then went into the financial services industry and started a family. His youngest son Drake has twice passed his old man with single-game passing totals of 448 yards vs. Wake Forest in 2022 and Syracuse with 442 in 2023.
"I loved that offense, we had great fun with it," Mark says. "But it was a different game back then, it wasn't as quarterback driven as it is now. We got hot that one day. Those are the ones you like to remember."
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) is in his 34th season writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner. Look for his columns throughout the season. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.
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