Yahoo Finance All eyes on Sam Howell and all ears on Mack Brown as UNC starts a season it hopes ends loudly
In one of many concessions the old-school coach has made to new-school thinking, Mack Brown roams North Carolina’s football practices wearing the kind of headset you might see on a spin instructor.
When he has something to say, which isn’t all that often as he wanders and observes, his voice cuts in over the music and resounds from the loudspeakers, the sound of disembodied authority, football coach as Big Brother.
“Don’t put the ball on the ground!” Brown says after a fumble during a drill, and like the team’s practice music, his voice echoes out across campus, booming beyond the football complex and past the law school, across Kenan Stadium and on toward Franklin Street, ringing off the trees and the brick and up into the sky.
Anyone on campus on Thursday could have chosen to obey Brown’s sporadic instructions, exhortations and admonitions, should they have been interested, none more frequent than the one that carried the most weight of all of them: “Don’t touch the quarterback!”
This is, of course, rule No. 1 at any football practice, especially on the first day of practice, and it applied in various phrasings to all of North Carolina’s quarterbacks when they were jostled, but it had a different urgency when the ball was knocked out of Sam Howell’s hand.
As the Tar Heels opened practice, with a difficult Friday night opener at Virginia Tech a month away, not all eyes were on Howell — there was certainly interest in plug-and-play Tennessee transfer Ty Chandler at running back, tasked with replacing both Javonte Williams and Michael Carter — but most of them were, most of the time.
Which, by this point, the junior quarterback, Bojangles spokesmodel and Heisman candidate understands, both implicitly and explicitly.
“This season is probably a little different,” Howell said. “People are saying a lot of things. But I’ve done a really good job my whole life of blocking that out and focusing on what really matters.”
Howell was one of the few things at practice Thursday that weren’t foremost on Brown’s mind, a given at this point. The coach had bigger-picture concerns, like finding playing time for a roster that’s deeper than at any point in his previous two seasons, finding ways to get better on special teams and, on the first day of practice at least, staunching the flow of penalties.
Even for a team picked to win the Coastal Division and expected to at least contend for a spot in the College Football Playoff, there’s a laundry list of areas that need to be shored up and weaknesses to be addressed. Quarterback is not one of them.
“Sam’s been one of the major reasons we’re a much better football team and a much better football program in Year 3,” Brown said.
Brown then went on to talk about the importance of maintaining and sustaining that progress in Year 4, when Howell is (presumably) gone to the NFL, a look ahead that only underlines the narrow window in which the Tar Heels are operating this season.
Brown has alluded to all of that in public before and did again on Thursday, and has addressed that with the team in private, but it almost goes without saying at this point. He doesn’t need a headset and loudspeaker to broadcast that to his team, or across campus, or throughout college football, that the Tar Heels think this was the first day of what might be their year.
