CHAPEL HILL – A week ago, Mack Brown and his staff basically hit the reset button beginning with North Carolina’s fourth spring football practice.

UNC practiced three times before having a week off for spring break, which allowed the coaches time to dissect every nuance of film to get a better idea of what they had in terms of personnel.

Last week, they began to separate players with respect to practice reps, moved a couple of guys to different positions and dove head first into full installation of the new offensive and defensive schemes.

Four practices later, including Tuesday morning, and Brown was very open about what the team hasn’t done well and where it needs work. And there’s a multitude of things that have him concerned.

“They’re retaining things better, (hut) we still don’t have great attention to detail. We’ve got too many mental mistakes, we’ve got too many missed alignments on defense, we’re really cutting down on the number of penalties – we’ve had ACC officials at every practice, so we think that we’re making progress there.

“But like today, we dropped too many balls, our quarterback-receiver connection was not good. We would not have won the game today on offense if we had played.”

Brown also spoke about having a high demand for competition and that the players will determine who plays not the coaches. They are treating every day like a game in terms of competition.

This staff isn’t wasting time. Players need to get on board and stay on board or they will be left behind. That’s the standard and the players must adjust.

Here are some more nuggets from Tuesday morning interview with Brown:

*The Tar Heels held a brief scrimmage this past Saturday. So what did Brown see from his team?

“I thought it was good,” Brown said. “We only had 30 plays and we didn’t have a down and distance because we felt like we needed to play. Obviously (offensive coordinator) Phil’s (Longo) playing fast on offense, but I thought it was pretty good.”

Brown also said they’re looking for leaders to step up. It’s clear not enough leaders have emerged so far, in part because some players are out on defense. But the expectation is that guys still step up and lead.

“We need some leadership to step up,” Brown said. “We’ve got about five guys that we’ll need on defense that aren’t playing this spring, but that’s when you’ve got to develop depth. And we’ve got to get these young guys to step up and do that and it’s kind of like a roller coaster.

“We’ve got to be consistently good. You can’t be great unless you’re consistently good and that’s the thing that we’re telling them.”

As for the guys that are out this spring that should be leaders, Brown said, “You’ve got to have at least one strong leader in each room, meaning each position room, and they lead that group. And if you can get more than that than that’s important, too.

“We’ve got two older safeties not playing, we’ve got two older outside linebackers not playing, we’ve got an older defensive tackle not playing. There’s some guys trying, but by and large we haven’t had vocal leaders and I think that comes with confidence, too. And this has not been a confident team.”

*Brown said some of the confidence issues is because guys are still learning new systems on both sides of the ball.

“Yes, absolutely. Both systems are completely new. I think we’ve had four different secondary coaches in four years here, so there’ve been a lot of coaching changes the last few years. This is all new to them again. (But), that’s an excuse, we’ve got to learn it.”

*So, with it obvious the entire program is knee deep into grind it out mode right now, has the honeymoon period formally ended for everyone?

“I didn’t think there was ever a honeymoon period for the guys because we jumped on them the day we got here and we’ve been really hard on them. And I think you’re finally getting to see guys, some are stepping up and some are stepping back and we’ve got to find out who steps back now and who steps up now.

“You don’t want it in the fourth quarter against South Carolina (in the opener). So practice has to be so hard that if a guy’s going to give in to it and he doesn’t want to play and he doesn’t want to compete lets find out now. Lets not wait until next fall.”