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Longo & Bateman Discuss Their Units, N.C. State & More

UNC's coordinators met with the media Monday and hit on a lot of topics, including Saturday's opponent, N.C. State.
UNC's coordinators met with the media Monday and hit on a lot of topics, including Saturday's opponent, N.C. State. (Jacob Turner, THI)

CHAPEL HILL – North Carolina’s coordinators met with the media Monday for their weekly pressconferences at the Kenan Football Center to discuss their units as the Tar Heels prepare for Saturday’s enormous game at N.C. State.

Offensive coordinator Phil Longo answered several questions about Sam Howell but also hit on the wide receivers, big plays, N.C. State’s defense and more.

Defensive coordinator Jay Bateman discussed N.C. State’s offense, why Jason Strowbridge has played outside a lot lately, Chris Collins redshirting and more.

Here are Longo’s and Bateman’s full pressers plus a few excerpts from what they had to say:


Phil Longo, Offensive Coordinator 

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UNC’s wide receivers have been finding a lot of grass lately, a reason the Tar Heels have hit on a lot more big touchdown pass plays in the second half of the season. The numbers for the year, however, are quite impressive as 23 pass plays in general have been for 30 yards or more. Breaking down the touchdown distances: three have gone for 60 or more yards; four for 50 or more; nine for 40 or more; 12 for 30 or more and 17 for 20 or more. The average distance on Howell’s 32 TD passes is 26.5 yards.

Just in the last five games, Howell has thrown 11 TD passes of 29 or more yards: 47, 68, 29, 47, 47, 34, 50, 42, 34, 66 and 33.

What has been the difference for the receivers finding more grass?

“They’ve really been doing a good job of that all season,” Longo said. “I thought the learning curve occurred in the spring. (Wide receivers) Coach (Lonnie) Galloway did a phenomenal job. When we got to camp we really felt like we were starting to turn the corner. Those guys had thrown on their own all summer so we were a lot closer to being an instinctive passing team in the summer time than we were in the spring.

“We were trying to push Dazz (Newsome) along a little bit and it just clicked. Right now, if somebody gives us a matchup and we can take a shot, great, but if they don’t, we’ve done a really good job of running our underneath and intermediate game. And our guys do have some run-after-catch ability, so when we give them a shot at 12 yards or 15 yards it’s not always a catch and tackle. It’s usually a catch and run and we’ve benefitted from run-after-catch (plays) all year. I’m really pleased with our receivers.”



Defensive Coordinator Jay Bateman

Jason Strowbridge spent most of his time on the field the last two games lined up at defensive end instead of inside at tackle, which is where he primarily played through the first nine games, eight of which he played (Strowbridge missed the Wake Forest game).

So why was Strowbridge moved outside these last two weeks?

“Part of it was in pass protection we were seeing people do things to him that inside are harder to counter,” Bateman said. “So when he’s inside and they start double-teaming it’s harder to manipulate that stuff as a defensive coordinator. So I wanted to try and get him more one-on-one looks.

“And they say we aligned a lot, a lot of times he was lined up alongside Tomon Fox, so we had our two best pass rushers beside each other so the protection was getting tilted there so much. We kept trying to blitz it but people were ‘We’ll deal with the blitz, we’re not going to let these two guys disrupt.'

“So part of it was to balance those two out and the other part of it was, when you start looking at who who’s playing the best for you, we thought Jahlil (Taylor) and Ray (Vohasek) were really coming along, maybe playing better than the d-ends were playing, so lets move Jason out there and make that position a real strength.”



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