Operating With A Purpose

CHAPEL HILL – It’s Tuesday evening and there are no lights on at Kenan Memorial Stadium. There’s nobody in the stands, no coaches on the field, and if not for one final interview taking place on the sideline involving North Carolina offensive tackle William Sweet, Chazz Surratt would be all alone.

Surratt is doing extra conditioning and he’s wearing his helmet. And his shoulder pads. And his thigh, knee and hip pads. He’s in his full practice uniform. There’s no taking it easy for UNC’s redshirt freshman quarterback. That’s not his style.

Thirty minutes earlier, the Tar Heels went through their post-practice conditioning. Most of the players took off their pads and some even tore the tape off of their wrists, hands, legs and arms. Surratt was in full pads.

Long after everyone but Sweet had walked through the Tar Pit tunnel and into the locker room, Surratt was on the field going from one sideline to the other. Back and forth. Back and forth, working to gain any edge he can.

“It just fires me up to see something like that on an everyday basis,” Sweet said toward the end of his interview. A few minutes later he noted his QB again.

“He’s still running,” Sweet said, smiling in amazement.

By Saturday evening, it’s possible Surratt will be North Carolina’s full-time quarterback. No more sharing duties with graduate transfer Brandon Harris. It very well could be his job.

But as competitive as the quarterback battle has been at UNC over the last five weeks, a competition that began with four legitimate contenders, Surratt’s greatest competition is himself, as in satisfying an insatiable desire to be perfect, to win all the time. And it’s not the kind of drive devoid of reality, he meticulously thinks this stuff through, and his maturity and confidence are simply unique for a just-turned 20-year-old.

“He’s always been a mature kid. Even in the process of getting to know him through recruiting in high school he is very calculated in what he does,” UNC quarterback coach Keith Heckendorf said. “He’s a great kid, first of all, what you see is what you get, and you get a great kid on the field you get a great kid off the field.

“But he’s an ultimate competitor, and the guys on our team can see that and will continue to rally around him.”

Hence, what Sweet said.

Yet, as much confidence as his position coach and teammates may have in him, Surratt is his own toughest critic.

In his only college game so far, the 6-3, 215-pound lefthander completed 18 of 28 pass attempts for 161 yards and a touchdown while also running the ball 16 times for 66 yards and another score. Splitting time with Harris, he engineered nine of UNC’s 14 possessions in Saturday’s 35-30 loss to California, leading the Heels to all four of their touchdowns.

That’s four TDs on nine possessions in his first college game. The film room, which reveals everything, is where Surratt focused on those other five possessions.

“A lot,” he said, referring to how much he zeroed in on those missed opportunities. “There’s plays we missed, I missed, or overall just things we missed overall as a team. We could have gone down and scored (more).

“You don’t want to focus on the negative all the time, but as a quarterback you’re trying to be a perfectionist, so you tend to focus more on the bad than the good. That’s my thought process.”

But Surratt is admittedly a harsh personal critic. “I want everything to be right,” he says. That’s why he works it and works it and works it.

Becoming a great quarterback, which is what the Denver, NC, native envisions for himself, is like kneading dough. And now that he’s played in a game, part of that process is diving into the game film. The tape of the Heels’ surprising loss was quite valuable.

“Definitely big for me because I (hadn’t) played on this level yet, that was my first one,” Surratt said. “So being able to evaluate myself in game action was good for me. There are definitely some things I can work on, but it was good to get the first one under my belt.”

On the positive, what Surratt saw was an athletic runner who can take a hit, handles the option well, including his pitches, though getting it down with his right hand will be helpful, and a QB who did well when he went through his progressions.

On the negative, Surratt saw a quarterback that didn’t always go through his progressions, called the wrong tags on some plays, missed a few open receivers, and could have been more patient deciding when to take off running on pass plays. But it’s all in the learning process, which comes mostly with more game experience, something Surratt will get.

“I’ve got a great deal of confidence in him and you see it day in and day out in practice and it continues and it continues to grow,” Heckendorf said. “And as he continues to get more and more playing time he’s going to grow in confidence, much like our quarterbacks in the past have.”

UNC has had an impressive run of quarterbacks going back to T.J. Yates under the previous coaching staff. But Bryn Renner, Marquise Williams and Mitch Trubisky under Fedora did very well at UNC and have each earned professional money.

Surratt is splitting time as of now, but eventually he could be the next name on that list. And running in an empty stadium to no fanfare while satisfying his own drive is partly how he will get there.