One of the common early themes of spring practice every season, no matter who the coach is or where they are coaching, is the importance of installing the offense.

Typically, the first five practices comprise plenty of agilities and skills work plus teams install their offenses, at least to the extent the staff wants to focus on that spring. But with North Carolina missing out entirely on its spring due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tar Heels didn’t get a chance to do their install.

A concern to a lot of coaches for obvious reasons, UNC offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Phil Longo isn’t too worried. Armed with the luxury of having so many players back on that side of the ball including all of its key skill performers, Longo believes his unit will be just fine in spite of the shutdown.

“I would say this probably works, offensively, in our favor this year more than maybe some other places because I gave an update in our offensive staff meeting this morning, our coaches are a little bit relieved because we had the offensive in,” Longo said during a virtual press conference Monday.

“I've been saying to media all winter we've got 35 players coming back on top of the four coaches that I have that are full-time because we've got 35 veteran players coming back that know the offense.”

They know it and can run it, plus they can teach the younger guys. Of the 13 players in the class of 2020 that enrolled in January, nine play on the offensive side of the ball and a 10th could end up on offense.

In addition, multiple young Tar Heels that had limited reps last season were going to get more time this spring, so missing out on a full install will affect them some.

But the bevy of vets in the program have helped make that a smoother transition.

“I've got a whole slew of receivers or linemen or running backs there that can teach them because they already know it,” Longo said.

“It's a benefit for us. I mean, we would much rather have spring ball and get the reps and get the physicality and do all of those things, but we're not re-inventing the offense. We're not installing all kinds of new stuff. So, we're probably ahead of the game mentally, and think we'll probably get into the groove a little bit sooner in camp in August than some others would because the offense hasn't changed.

Of course, having one of the top quarterbacks in the nation back helps. Then consider he’s the football version of a gym rat on the field and in the film room and knows every nuance of the offense, and the Heels were in excellent shape before the shutdown and will be once the players eventually return to Chapel Hill and are working out on their own.

“As long as Sam Howell is here, the offense will be what he knows right now,” Longo said. “We're just going to keep working on getting better at it with him and that's true for every position in the offense.”

A term some fans may be familiar with but not entirely understand is “player-led practices.” In a late February press conference in advance of spring practice, which was supposed to start March 17 and end with the spring game April 18, Mack Brown offered some information he was getting from the player-led practices.

It isn’t all that difficult to surmise a scenario in which the players get themselves to a certain standard point with the offense, but to what extent can they really move things when there aren’t any coaches around?

They don’t run just drills, they do 11-on-11 stuff and get pretty deep into the scheme. But how deep?

“Really, most of it. I think that the big challenge with the staff in this system is to learn it like I know it - and they're professionals, so they did - and then teach it to the players and get them to a point where they know it like we do,” Longo said.

The staff more than fine tunes things and pushes for the unit to hit the right tempo, so that was lost, as was running it against a defense in full contact. But Longo is quick to point out that every team in the nation is in the same boat, even the ones that got well into their spring work. Nobody played a spring game or got close and only a handful of teams ran scrimmages.

So while the structured install of Longo’s offense didn’t take place this spring, he’s confident his players not only know the offense, but aren’t far from mastering it and will pick up where they left off whenever norm is restored.