North Carolina football begins its spring practices next week with coach Mack Brown hitting a reset after a disappointing 6-7 record last season.
The big question of who will be the replacement for record-setting quarterback Sam Howell won’t be answered until the precipice of the season opener when practice resumes in August. But until then, Brown is aiming to re-establish the culture that had the Tar Heels overachieving his first two seasons back in Chapel Hill.
“You got to play to your standard every week and not get so high and so low,” Brown said. “And last year’s team for us was a high-low team and that just drives a coach nuts, so that’s what we’re working to overcome.”
Brown spoke with the media via video conference for nearly an hour Tuesday. He covered college football topics like roster management and the need for the NCAA to keep cheating under the guise of Name, Image and Likeness from getting out of control. But Brown’s focus was on what the Tar Heels have to do to get better.
“We’re going to go back and create that edge and make sure that we’re not walking around acting like we just been to the Orange Bowl where we’re eighth in the country,” Brown said. “Right now, we haven’t proven anything so we’re starting over as a program and we want to go back to the basics that we had that first year.”
Carolina welcomes a different look defensively, where the program parted ways with former coordinator Jay Bateman in the offseason. Brown hired Gene Chizik, his former defensive coordinator on his national championship team at Texas and who led Auburn to a national title as head coach.
The Heels at times last season missed too many tackles and played games where they blamed miscommunication for being out of position to make plays.
“We’ve got to be more aggressive downhill with our linebackers, we’ve got to be more aggressive with our front,” Brown said. “We can’t be a read front where we’re holding, you get knocked off the ball. This league’s too good for that. We’ve got to be aggressive and we’ve got to attack.”
Chizik is charged with improving a unit that finished 11th in the ACC in total defense allowing 418 yards per game and 12th in scoring defense allowing 32.1 points per game. Brown said the goal was to have 22 players who can fit into the rotation on defense.
Brown believes the Heels might be more talented overall as a team than they’ve been in the past three seasons, but they’re also going to be younger in a lot of positions. That’s why he’s kind of glad that Carolina won’t receive praise and a top 10 preseason ranking like it did last year. They’ll be back to operating out of the spotlight.
“I’m going back and putting an absolute emphasis on every little detail to make sure that we’re doing little things right,” Brown said. “And instead of sitting here talking about what we’re going to do and what we’re going to win, we’re going back to setting the standard that we need to do everything right to get there.”
That includes the quarterback position, where Drake Maye and Jacolby Criswell are eager to fill Howell’s void. The difference being Howell was so advanced with the system that he could operate spring drills as if the season had started.
It won’t be like that for the quarterbacks, including Jefferson Boaz and incoming freshman Conner Harrell, this spring. Brown said they’re making some tweaks to the offense.
“We’re really going to have a lot of a lot more situations in spring practice than we’ve ever done instead of just lining up to play,” Brown said. “We’re gonna make sure that we have specific goals that we’ve got to get accomplished and the quarterback that can make those plays the most is the one that plays.”
