UNC defensive improvement evident in spring game

In the week before North Carolina played Clemson last December in the ACC championship game, the Tar Heels coaching staff installed a defensive package, called hawk, that the players had never practiced before, or even heard of.

“We hadn’t talked about hawk the entire season until we had played Clemson,” Cayson Collins, a UNC linebacker, said on Saturday after the team’s annual spring scrimmage. “So that week, we talked about that package and everybody’s role and responsibility.”

That was UNC’s introduction to that particular set of defensive plays, Collins said. During the past month of spring practices, though, Collins on Saturday said the defense talked about hawk “ad nauseum.”

“So that just kind of talks about how where we are now,” Collins said, “compared to where we were last year.”

A year or so ago, the Tar Heels were still in the early stages of installing an entirely new defensive scheme under an entirely new defensive coaching staff, one led by coordinator Gene Chizik. The new defense was in its infancy then, and in some ways it remained so throughout last fall.

Now there are signs of maturation. Some of them were evident in the spring game on Saturday, when the defense forced four turnovers, all on interceptions, and held its own in a controlled scrimmage with a unique scoring system that provided the defense with an equal chance to accumulate points.

“If you go all the way back to the spring of last year, we put in nothing but base (plays) and didn’t do anything else,” UNC coach Larry Fedora said on Saturday. “And that’s all they did for 15 days. This year, because of where we left off, these guys were able to expand everything.”

Fedora spoke of expanded defensive fronts – seven- and eight-men wide – that last year at this time were still a long ways from becoming reality. He spoke of new blitz packages Chizik has installed, and about “a lot of things that we weren’t able to do with last year’s team.”

Offense is still believed to be the Tar Heels’ strength, and with good reason. They lost only three starters from a record-setting offense and Fedora hopes that, in time, the offense could be even more potent with Mitch Trubisky, the rising redshirt junior, at quarterback.

Trubisky and the offense had their moments early on Saturday. Trubisky, who completed 13 of his 22 attempts for 148 yards, ended his second drive with an 18-yard touchdown pass to Mack Hollins. Not long after, rising senior running back Khris Francis ended another drive with a 16-yard touchdown run.

Outside of those two plays, though, the defense kept the offense out of the end zone until late in the scrimmage. The offense finished with a 74-70 victory – with points based on, among other things, defensive stops and yards gained on a given play – but the defense provided its share of highlights.

Among them was Des Lawrence’s interception in the second half. That came on a pass that Trubisky threw toward the right sideline, and Lawrence, the rising senior cornerback, jumped in front of it to create the turnover.

“This year we were able to put a lot of things in,” Lawrence said of the defense. “And I feel like everybody knows where the next man is going to be, so it allows them to play faster.”

That, Lawrence said, is the most significant defensive difference: less hesitation. More speed.

Some of UNC’s youngest defensive players appeared to have picked things up quickly, too. Myles Dorn, Myles Wolfork and Jonathan Smith – three players who graduated from high school early and enrolled at UNC in January – combined to make 14 tackles on Saturday.

Fedora said that all eight of UNC’s early enrollees, with the exception of quarterback Logan Byrd, received “extensive” and “meaningful” playing time in the spring. The three newcomers were among the bright spots on an overall strong day for the defense, one that’s growing in Chizik’s second season.

A year ago at this time, Collins and some of his other teammates said on Saturday that they knew about two or three defensive plays. And now? Now just about the entire defense has been installed, which wasn’t even the case late last season.

“We have all of our base stuff in, we have third down packages in, we have our goal line packages in,” Collins said. “We’ve got different pressures and stuff in.

“We have about 13 calls that are all pressures that we hadn’t even talked about this time last year. So it’s a huge difference comparing where we are now to where we were last year.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2016 at 8:07 PM with the headline "UNC defensive improvement evident in spring game."