Extra Points: Hat Tricks

By Lee Pace

Carolina football helmets will have some new adornments this fall. It's a tradition that has, to varying degrees, dated back to the Bill Dooley era of the late 1970s. Now, it's being resurrected with helmets decorated with Tar Heel foot decals.

If the Tar Heels open their season with a win at Minnesota, for example, the helmet of every player will have a decal added for the Sept. 7 home opener against Charlotte.

If a running back rushes for 100 yards or gains 50 percent of his yards after contact, he gets a decal.

If an offensive lineman executes a pancake block, he gets a decal.

If a linebacker has 10 or more tackles, he gets a decal.

If the kick-off team stops the opponent inside the 20, everyone on the unit gets a decal.

If you're deemed Player of the Week on the offensive and defensive scout teams, you get a decal.

Coach Mack Brown and his staff with input from the Player Leadership Council devised a list of criteria that will reward players on a team, unit and individual levels for hitting various performance landmarks.

It's similar to the system Brown used in his first tenure at Carolina from 1988-97, when the program morphed from back-to-back 1-10 seasons into six straight bowl appearances and Top 10 finishes in 1996-97.

"When we were here the first time, we were struggling and trying to get better," Brown says. "We felt like visible rewards were something to help motivate the guys and show who was doing well."

Brown moved to Texas in 1998 and learned that longtime Longhorns Coach Darrell Royal had never utilized the helmet decal program, so Brown decided not to rock the tradition boat during his 16 years at Texas. Making this move now, five years into his second tenure in Chapel Hill, is a result of Brown and his staff looking for every motivational trick it can pull out of its hat.

"Everything we're doing now is trying to get from winning eight or nine games to winning every game," Brown says. "So, we're pulling out every little stop we feel might help our guys to get better."

The tradition of applying helmet decals apparently began in the 1960s with Bo Schembechler awarding his players at Miami (Ohio) with tomahawk stickers during the 1965 season. Two years later, Woody Hayes at Ohio State began the tradition of his players wearing the ubiquitous buckeye decals that exist today. Schembechler moved to Michigan in 1969, and his first meeting with Hayes featured both teams wearing helmets covered with stickers acquired through the season.

Hayes was convinced by the athletic trainer at the time to commemorate big plays with the stickers.

"Woody wasn't really huge on heaping praise on guys," Ohio State athletic department staffer Larry Romanoff told ESPN. "I don't know how long it took the guys to convince Woody to do that."

The Tar Heels were wearing decals at least by the 1976 season under Dooley, the head coach from 1967-77. Football-shaped decals were placed on the back of helmets for individual achievements, and stars were applied to the front of the helmet for reaching team goals each week.

Beginning in the 1978 season under Dick Crum, Tar Heels were awarded small football decals for individual achievements. Their helmets were also adorned on a week-by-week basis on the back-right corner with the letters Fe (the symbol on the Periodic Table for iron) and beside it the male gender symbol of a circle with an arrow out the upper-right.

"Iron Man," of course.

The designation came from some combination (memories are sparse on the specifics four decades later) of weight-room production, not missing workouts or practices and class attendance.

"We all had to be invested in each of these areas throughout the week of practice in order to be rewarded," says QB Rod Elkins (letterman 1980-82). "It was all-encompassing and was designed to demonstrate commitment, responsibility, accountability, and discipline. For example, if you were found not to be going to class or study hall, or getting treatment if injured, not hitting your goals in the weight room or not familiar with the game plan for that week, you would not be rewarded with Iron Man status."

"For those of us that didn't get to play much, being an Iron Man was a great reward," adds Rob Patton, another Tar Heel of that era.

When Brown took the job in 1988, he changed the award stickers to the Tar Heel foot emblems.

"The more stickers you had, you knew you made a lot of plays," says Tommy Thigpen, the Tar Heel linebackers coach who played for Carolina from 1989-92. "If you had no decals, it meant you weren't making any plays. You look across the line and see a guy with his helmet covered, you know that guy was a football player. Sometimes you don't know who 'the guy' is. Well, you see those decals and you know that dude can play."

"The players love it. They count them. If a guy gets seven decals, he says, 'I made seven plays that impacted the outcome of that game.' That's important."

Graduate rush end Kaimon Rucker embraced the idea as soon as he heard it from Brown and the Leadership Council and when the position coaches began parsing the criteria for awarding decals.

"There are some other teams in college football who do it, I like the way the decals pop out on their helmets," he says. "It gives them a little extra swag and style. We have a classy look—the Tar Heel foot and the black mark on the heel. It's a little extra motivation and incentive."

Rucker intends to have a helmet covered in decals come November—for sacks, forced fumbles, batted passes and the like. And certainly one for making what first-year coordinator Geoff Collins deems a "psycho play."

"That's for relentless effort, off the charts," Rucker says. "You're playing out of your mind. It's like if you're out of a play, you sprint across the field and make psycho effort to get back in it."

The decals will be affixed to both the Carolina blue and the while helmets the Tar Heels alternate throughout the season—white stickers for the blue headgears and blue for the white. Certainly the desire to finish a season strong and eclipse the eight- to nine-win season ceiling that has loomed over the program of late is motivation in itself. But a little innovation and creativity and a means to have some fun is a good thing as well.

"Those stickers fostered competition and built team morale," says Chuckie Burnett, the Burlington quarterback who played from 1989-91. "They added a personal touch to each player's helmet and visually represented our hard work and dedication throughout the season."

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

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