UNC ends spring football practice, starts looking ahead to September

One-hundred and thirty-eight days. That’s how many remain between Monday and Sept. 3, when North Carolina begins the 2016 season in Atlanta against Georgia in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff.

Between now and then, the Tar Heels will go through summer conditioning work and preseason practice. Larry Fedora, entering his fifth season as head coach, will undoubtedly continue to offer a countdown, as he did not long ago when the topic of the season-opener came up.

You can count on those things. And you can count on no shortage of familiar preseason rites: talk of position battles, some of them more legitimate than others, and lots of discussion about how much different things are compared with last year.

Those talking points are annual events anywhere a football team is preparing for a new year. For now, though, the fall seems like a long ways off. Spring practice ended Saturday with the Tar Heels’ annual spring scrimmage.

Here’s a look at what we learned and at the storylines that could emerge entering the fall:

1. Quarterback

It’s going to be difficult for Fedora to say there’s much of a quarterback competition.

Mitch Trubisky, a rising redshirt junior, didn’t exactly set Kenan Stadium ablaze in Saturday’s spring game, but he played well enough: 13-for-22 for 148 yards, with a touchdown pass and one interception.

Trubisky looked good, especially early on, when he connected with Mack Hollins for an 18-yard touchdown. Trubisky’s lone interception came on a well-thrown pass to the sideline. Des Lawrence, a rising senior cornerback, happened to make a great play to create a turnover.

Still, Fedora didn’t rave about Trubisky after the game. Said Fedora: “I thought he did a good job.” That’s probably all Trubisky’s performance warranted, anyway, but expect Fedora to be judicious in his praise. Why? Because Fedora really wants Trubisky to earn the starting job.

Never mind that the starting quarterback position became Trubisky’s as soon as last season ended. Fedora hasn’t spoken about Trubisky like he’s the starter, and Fedora recently reiterated that Trubisky has to earn his position and that the only people who have anointed him are media members.

What happened Saturday, though, doesn’t help Fedora’s cause. Caleb Henderson, the only other UNC quarterback who has played in a college game, did not play well and threw three interceptions – the first of which came on an underthrow that wobbled well short of its intended target.

It was only the spring game. And Henderson completed eight of his other nine attempts. Still, Trubisky probably has as much of a command on the starting quarterback job as any player has on any position.

The more interesting question is who backs up Trubisky. It’ll probably be Henderson.

But there is some competition from Nathan Elliott, a redshirt freshman from Celina, Texas, and Logan Byrd, who enrolled early. And don’t forget about Manny Miles, son of LSU coach Les Miles. Manny received some time late in the spring game and completed five of his eight attempts for 52 yards.

2. Defense

The defense is past the beginner stage in its still-new scheme.

After the spring game, several people offered good perspectives on the continuing development of UNC’s defense. A year ago, if you remember, this was a defense filled with players still reeling from that difficult 2014 season, one of the worst defensive seasons in school history.

Back then, a year ago, players were still learning the basics under Gene Chizik, UNC’s defensive coordinator who had been hired to fix a mess. Here’s how Fedora and some of the players described where they were a year ago:

▪ Fedora: “If you go all the way back to the spring of last year, we put in nothing but base (defense) and didn’t do anything else. And that’s all they did for 15 days.”

▪ Cornerback Des Lawrence: “Last year, we were much more vanilla. We were only able to come out here with two calls last year, because they just wanted to make sure they knew what we were doing.”

▪ Linebacker Cayson Collins: “Last year at this time, we had about two, three calls in. And that was our base stuff – the stuff that we really ran a lot of last year. And we were just trying to understand … the base concepts of everything that we were doing, and the little details and everything. So they didn’t want to put a lot on us the first time that we were running everything.”

Collins shared an interesting story. He went back to the week of the ACC championship game in December. UNC was getting ready to play Clemson, and Chizik and the coaching staff installed a new defensive package called “hawk.”

“We hadn’t talked about hawk the entire season until we had played Clemson,” Collins said. “So that week, we talked about that package and everybody’s role and responsibility, and we talked about that ad nauseam during spring ball.

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

The defensive basics that were so new a year ago are now familiar. That has allowed Chizik to go ahead with the rest of the defensive installation. UNC kept it pretty basic and simple during the spring game – there’s no use in putting anything out there on film, after all, that another team could study – but it sounds like the defense should be more advanced.

The Tar Heels will have more defensive fronts to choose from, and more blitzes. Things like the “hawk” package that Collins described are no longer foreign.

“This year, because of where we left off, these guys were able to expand everything and get into seven-man fronts, eight-man fronts,” Fedora said. “Different blitz packages. A lot of things that we weren’t able to do with last year’s team. So we were just able to elevate it to another level for those guys as far as what was put in.”

3. First-year players

Some first-year players could have a chance to contribute.

You never know how it’s going to work with freshmen, even the touted ones, even the ones who arrive physically ready. Sometimes even “can’t miss” prospects miss, especially early in their time at college. So who knows how it’s going to go for the eight players who enrolled early at UNC.

Some of them will have a chance to contribute early, though. Jonathan Smith, a linebacker, is among them. He should still be in high school, but he finished UNC’s spring game with three tackles. If the season began tomorrow, he might be starting, given the Tar Heels’ perilous injury situation and lack of depth at linebacker.

“He’s come in here and handled everything,” Fedora said. “Because you think about it, he came in in January, and we’ve put more in this year defensively than we did last spring. So he was starting from scratch, and he really did a nice job. He studies it, he learned it, and he’s made plays for us throughout the spring, and he’s gotten a lot of reps.”

So Smith could play early. There’s more depth and experience in the secondary – and thus fewer opportunities for younger players – but Myles Dorn and Myles Wolfolk are two defensive backs who could contribute early, too. Fedora sounded happy with them and others.

“I’m going to tell you that Myles Dorn, Myles Wolfolk, all those guys that have come in early, those eight guys, I think it was eight, that came in (early), they have all – that’s one thing about this spring – they were able to get a lot of reps,” Fedora said. “There was not a position where they didn’t get a lot of reps. Probably Logan Byrd at the quarterback position had the fewest of all of them.

“But the rest of them, they were in extensive playing time and meaningful playing time in all of the scrimmages and all the practices.”

And so there you have it. Some takeaways from the spring. The countdown to the season, and to the start of preseason practice, has begun.

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 4:55 PM with the headline "UNC ends spring football practice, starts looking ahead to September."