Mentally, UNC’s Sam Howell has already moved on to the NFL (but only temporarily)
When it comes to Heisman Trophy talk, Sam Howell is as adept at side-stepping that incoming pressure as he is pass rushers. When it comes to his NFL future, Howell takes it head on.
With spring practice wiped out by the coronavirus and Howell’s sophomore season at North Carolina very much in doubt, Howell has been limited to throwing on the side with his personal coach — former Duke quarterback Anthony Boone — twice a week and occasional sessions with Tar Heels receiver Dyami Brown.
But this was always an offseason when Howell intended to sharpen his mental game, and offensive coordinator Phil Longo has done it by throwing a different playbook at Howell. Or playbooks, from NFL defenses, and (mentally) running North Carolina’s offense against them. That’s part of Longo’s four-year quarterback training plan, something Howell would be doing anyway at this point, but it happens to be a good time to do it.
“We’re going through games and talking about, ‘Hey, what would we run here?’ and how would we execute it against, say, the Eagles’ goal-line defense from Week 4,” Longo said. “And it’s great mental work. What’s happening is, we’re covering a lot of scenarios in the game of football that don’t always come up. They’re more obscure but it’s giving us an opportunity to hit them all.
“And I have a checklist that we can sit and go through them in checklist order to address them all, and we do that, but it’s a lot more realistic when we watch a game in game speed and I call a play or signal it to him on Zoom and he can look at it and say, ‘I’d go here here and here, and here’s why’ and ‘I’d protect myself this way.’”
For Howell, it’s a whole new way of looking at the game, one that’s far more complex on the defensive side — but that also gets him one step closer to his end goal.
“It’s been a little different,” Howell said. “I haven’t really studied a lot of NFL myself, on the defensive side of the ball. It’s definitely something that’s been very good for me as part of my development. My final goal is to end up playing in the NFL one day and coach Longo is going to do everything he can to help me get there.”
That’s the ironic thing about Longo talking about a “four-year plan” for Howell, who doesn’t figure to be on campus a day after his junior season. Even this far out, his NFL stock is sky-high, based on his arm and mobility and how quickly he assimilated the college game during his freshman season, throwing for more than 3,600 yards and an FBS-record 38 touchdowns by a freshman.
He’s comfortable talking about that part of his future. His Heisman prospects, less so.
“It’s always been a goal of mine to win the Heisman Trophy, but really, I’m just worried about my team. And I know if I do what I’m supposed to do and my team has a really good season, things will go well for me. I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can and make sure we’re winning games. It would be selfish of me to go into the season with one goal, to win the Heisman Trophy.”
If there is a season, Howell will go into it as one of the top Heisman candidates with only a few hours separating him from Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence and not much else, individually speaking. In terms of their teams, there’s still a wide gulf, even if it was only mere inches under the lights at Kenan Stadium last fall.
“We definitely have a lot of excitement around our program right now,” Howell said. “We have to make sure we look at it the right way. Just because it’s supposed to happen doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
