Communication A Key In UNC's Controlled Chaos

CHAPEL HILL – Controlled chaos.

That’s how many Tar Heels are describing their new defense under Jay Bateman, who joined Mack Brown’s new staff at North Carolina this past winter.

To the outside world, which includes everyone not on the UNC staff or roster, or Bateman’s previous stop, Army, the new defense is supposed to appear a bit unkempt and almost in pre-snap disarray. But to the Tar Heels, it’s completely under control. They see the method to the madness, but only when on the same page.

To get there and stay there, the Heels must communicate on the field at all times. All defenses talk, but this requires another level of communication. To understand and execute Bateman’s defense, the players need to talk it up in pre-snap and even after a play starts. Constant chatter. That’s the key.

“You want everybody to be able to talk to each other and know what’s going on everywhere, not just their position,” junior hybrid defensive end/linebacker Tomon Fox said. “They’ve got to know what the guy next to them is doing to help them out.”

Bateman employed his unique approach at Army over the last five years building a unit that finished last season ranked No. 8 nationally in total defense and No. 10 in scoring defense, allowing an average of 17.7 points per game.

But the Black Knights weren’t doing anything conventionally. In part, their personnel necessitated an approach that came from outside-the-box, but Bateman has never been anything but original. No problem because it's worked for him.

And it’s not that Bateman’s football eccentricities, if you will, are simply a byproduct of his personality. This approach was born out of a need in the always-changing landscape of college football. With the 4-3, 3-4 and 4-2-5 base defenses struggling nationally to stop the spread offenses that continue adding RPO plays while racking up video-game numbers, defenses have been forced to adjust. Bateman is leading the way in many respects.

His uber-hybrid scheme has proven it can slow some of the best offenses in the nation. Army took Oklahoma into overtime (21-21 score) last September before falling 28-21. Army’s last five opponents failed to hit the 20-point mark and overall, and eight times the 11-2 Black Knights held their foes below 20 points.

“(Bateman) does it with making things look very, very complicated and making all the checks on offense check into bad plays and then he slants and brings people late, brings people on delayed blitzes,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of things like that a number of people aren’t doing in college football and the guys are excited about it.”

Bateman’s defense will blitz from just about anywhere originating from a couple of dozen personnel packages. In a sense, everyone on the field is a potential blitzer. A player may line up as a linebacker most often but also a defensive end and maybe even at safety, as examples. Though the latter might be a stretch for this particular UNC team given its personnel with respect to Army's a year ago. This makes it difficult for opposing quarterbacks to track and identify what the defenders are doing and where they’re coming from.

The idea is to completely confuse the offense into scheming against something that doesn’t happen while employing a different tactic. They may think a heavy rush is coming from one spot when it doesn’t happen, it comes from somewhere else. So, offenses sometimes end up essentially blocking space instead of defenders.

Needless to say, to execute this approach on literally every snap requires a high level of communication to achieve success, or it will quickly descend into a disheveled mess.

“It’s a lot of adjustments by what people are doing on the field, so we just have to talk a lot, it keeps everything going,” sophomore nickel back Trey Morrison said.

Naturally, the first few weeks of spring football bore the look of discombobulation than anything resembling cohesion. Carolina was moving from a 4-3 base defense in which the Mike linebacker called pretty much everything and the defense rarely changed things other than adding a fifth and sometimes sixth defensive back. It also struggled mightily.

Blitzing? The Tar Heels didn’t exactly pin their ears back much in recent years nor did they create much havoc, a reason Carolina picked off just 15 passes over the last three seasons, a figure far below any other Power 5 program. As a frame of reference, UNC had 36 passes intercepted in that same span, which included quarterback Mitch Trubisky’s highly efficient 2016 campaign.

The 2019 Tar Heels will blitz a lot, but often when they don’t show it. They will do a little bit of everything. Sometimes, the disguise will be that there is no disguise. That’s the beauty of winning the mind game before each snap.

“The 3-4 front, the variety of coverages, variety of blitzes we run, it’s a variety of things that we’re gonna do that gives us an advantage but also gives the front an advantage…,” junior defensive back Greg Ross said. “A lot of disguise, a lot of different looks to give the offenses problems.”

And so, everyone being on the same page is the first step to successfully executing the Heels’ multiple-everything defense.

“The d-line has checks, linebackers have checks, safeties have checks,” Fox said. “We have to hear what the safeties are saying, the linebackers have to hear what the d-line’s saying, everything goes together.

“So, everybody has to make sure they’re talking to each other.”

The players admit learning the scheme and then employing it in practice was at times mentally taxing this past spring. They will be challenged to escalate the learning process this week with fall camp opening Aug. 2. A positive is they’ve had a taste of it working.

When that happens, the process becomes well worth it.

“It’s really fun,” junior safety D.J. Ford said. “We get to show we’re doing one thing and do something else. Everything looks the same but (is) different at the same time and we’re coming from all over the place – controlled chaos.

“It’s foreign to someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, it’s like trying to read Chinese or something.”

Not to the Tar Heels and especially not when they’re barking to each other in their own Bateman-esque way.

Before they run, before the hit and before they take ownership of a game, the defense must first communicate with each other before every play. Otherwise, it really will be chaos.