Jay Bateman recently told a short story, while chuckling, about when he and Chazz Surratt watched some clips from last season’s season-opening win over South Carolina.
It was a landmark game for the former North Carolina quarterback, as it signaled his full transition to linebacker, a move that surprised many eight months earlier.
But there he was against the Gamecocks using his amazing natural gifts to make plays while hampered by his inexperience in making mistakes. The latter was the cause of humor for Bateman, later backed up by Surratt.
“I remember watching it with him, this was back in probably February, him and I sitting down and watching it,” Bateman said. “And we were watching some of the South Carolina clips, and he's like, ‘Oh,’ and I'm like, ‘Tell me about it.’”
Surratt still racked up a team-high 12 tackles that day, one of which was a sack. He broke up a pass and was credited with another QB hurry. Not bad for a guy in the infancy stage as a linebacker.
Fast forward a couple of months and Bateman’s laughter centered more on just how ridiculously effective Surratt was much more often than not, yet he was still a bit of a novice to some of the position’s nuances.
He ended up first-team All-ACC and was the runner-up for ACC Defensive Player of the Year. Not bad for a guy who passed for 1,352 yards and eight touchdowns, plus ran for another six scores, including a pair of 56-yard TD scampers, in his earlier days as a Tar Heel.
Bateman’s mission was to turn that dude into a wrecking ball on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Not just some of the time but all of the time. So, the focus once the players reconvened in January was to break apart every negative from Surratt’s season to rebuild each part. This could make him not only a great college player but a high NFL draft pick.
“We were just watching mistakes and football makes sense to Chazz,” Bateman said. “I’ve said that a bunch, so I’m very confident when we get back he’s going to be a better player than he was when we finished up last year, and physically he’s got some tools that very few people have. I think he’ll be way ahead of where he was at the end of last year.”
Surratt is used to seeing the game as a quarterback, in which studying defenses for hours a day is the norm, so it didn’t take long to learn his job but also everyone else’s. He kind of knew already. It’s the consistent execution that needed refinement.
Priority number one in this quest is to better recognize angles and use them to his advantage.
“I had a tendency to over-pursue the ball carrier,” Surratt said. “So, just working on that, I’ve been working on that pretty much the whole time during this break and I’ll continue to work on it."
At 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, he finished second in the ACC with 115 tackles, 6.5 of which went for sacks and 15 for a loss of yardage. He also registered 10 QB hurries. But PFF graded him out at 64.1 last fall, which was twelfth on Carolina’s defense. Hence, the high number of mistakes.
Surratt was charged with missing 27 tackles, and the belief is had he arrived a split second sooner, thus better using angles, that number could be cut in half or more so. It’s not just the angles, though. There’s plenty more on the docket for Surratt.
“There were sometimes I lined up wrong, just not knowing,” he said. “And then there were times I played the wrong gap. Sometimes I spilled a block when I should have boxed it, not doing a good job with my hands, over pursuing. Those types of things that I cleaned up over the course of the season and still have to do a better job at.”
Add shedding blockers, too. Bateman said that will be a point of emphasis whenever the players return and can actually put on the pads and have at it some.
Like Bateman said, football makes sense to Surratt, so when they laugh it up next fall, it won’t be watching his boo boos on the field. That’s a near certainty.
