UNC football defense moves beyond simplicity

North Carolina’s defense did a lot of good things in 2015. Under first-year defensive coordinator Gene Chizik, the Tar Heels allowed 15 fewer points per game than the year before. They finished as a top-20 pass defense and won 11 games and a spot in the ACC Championship.

But two losses — one to Clemson in the ACC title game and another to Baylor in the Russell Athletic Bowl — ended the season on a sour note.

Now the attitude at spring practices is undeniably different for UNC than a year ago. The bar has been raised. A second year in Chizik’s scheme brings added familiarity, but added expectations.

“We did a great job last year winning 11 games,” said redshirt junior defensive tackle Nazair Jones. “But we got bigger heights to reach next year.”

The Tar Heels will try to reach those heights without linebackers Shakeel Rashad and Jeff Schoettmer. The senior duo accounted for almost half of UNC’s tackles and played a huge leadership role on the team. Junior Cayson Collins and sophomore Andre Smith will be looked to as the next men up.

“I don’t know that we’re going to have the leadership from that group that we did last year because of the two guys we’ve lost, but we’ve got some really athletic guys that can run,” Coach Larry Fedora said.

Jones and senior cornerback Des Lawrence have taken it upon themselves to step into the leadership void. They’re at a slight disadvantage because neither of them play linebacker like Schoettmer and Rashad did, but Lawrence has a loud enough personality that it might not matter.

“I’m just trying to put myself in a position where everybody knows that I’m going to come work every day and that they can rely on me,” he said.

After installing only two calls at this point a year ago, UNC has worked on layering complexity into its defense this spring. Chizik’s defense was praised for its simplicity compared to what his predecessor ran, and much of the reason the defense played better was players thought less and reacted more.

That simplicity hurt UNC against the higher-powered offenses of Clemson and Baylor, though, which shredded the Tar Heels at the end of the year.

“Now that we know the basics, now it’s time to do the extra stuff,” Jones said. “Now it’s time to do the same thing and make it look different, or to do something different and make it look the same. We’re just trying to make it more difficult for offenses to figure out what we’re doing.”

It’s been 102 days since UNC’s season ended, and it’s still 149 days until the Tar Heels’ season opener against Georgia on Sept. 3. The team will find out a lot about itself in between now and then.

But the defense already knows what it has to do.

“We’ve got to finish in those big games,” Jones said. “We can’t lose to Clemson, we can’t lose to Baylor.

“We just got to dominate no matter if they score.”

@loganulrich

sports@dailytarheel.com