UNC Practices Pack More Punch with Focus on Physicality

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — As North Carolina opened training camp during the weekend, there was a moment when running back Caleb Hood sounded as if he might’ve been channeling a no-nonsense answer from the Bill Belichick playbook on public speaking.

Through recent years, one of the criticisms that has persisted about the Tar Heels is they’ve been something of a soft football team under Mack Brown’s watch. Is that an accurate appraisal from a player’s perspective?

“I ain’t going to speak on the past or the future,” the fifth-year senior Hood said in response. “I think right now we’re focused on getting better and being more physical, and I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that.”

An emphasis on playing with increased physicality on both sides of the ball remains underlined among UNC’s core priorities for this preseason, while the Tar Heels work toward the approaching 2025 season and their Sept. 1 opener against TCU.

UNC veterans such as Hood and cornerback Marcus Allen said that focus on more force, one of the fundamental principles under Belichick’s new regime, starts with a certain attitude permeating from the top down. Hood said even before Belichick presided over his first practice session in the spring, a noticeable shift occurred when Freddie Kitchens became the Tar Heels’ interim coach upon Brown’s firing.

“It’s really just a mindset,” Hood said. “I know Coach Kitchens, as soon as he took over during bowl practice, we were doing hitting drills. Like the middle of practice, he would just blow the whistle and we were in the middle of the field. So it just kind of started there and it’s kept going.

“It’s a big emphasis, and it’s really just a mentality. You can go out there and try to be physical. But at the end of the day, it’s just about mentality and if you want to for real.”

Internally, one clear line of delineation that marks Carolina’s change from Brown to Belichick — coaching lifers who only are eight months apart in age — is the policing of the occasional fights that can flare up and boil over during practice settings at times.

Sources have said in the past, players would face punishments and assistant coaches would be called on the carpet for such overly aggressive actions in practices. Now, it’s not that clashes between teammates are encouraged by Belichick and Co., sources have said. Those confrontations are reprimanded and regulated, of course, while order is maintained. But gone are the days when practice skirmishes were adjudicated as something forbidden. This is football, after all.

UNC is under its third defensive coordinator in three seasons in Steve Belichick, the oldest of Bill Belichick’s two sons. And tackling with improved force certainly could help spark growth in some areas where the Tar Heels have been lacking on defense.

Carolina allowed at least 34 points in five of the seven losses the team suffered last season in 2024. The Tar Heels finished outside the top 65 nationally in run defense across each of Brown’s last five seasons in charge of the program, bottoming out at No. 93 in 2021 (when Jay Bateman was defensive coordinator), and Nos. 92 and 93 in 2022 and 2023 (when Gene Chizik was defensive coordinator).

“I wouldn’t say there was like a specific moment,” Allen said, asked to pinpoint when he understood there would be more tackling and physicality during Belichick’s practices. “When Coach Belichick came in here, I was already thinking, ‘it’s about to be a whole different change.’ I think it’s good that we’re being really physical in practice, so that we can take the physicality from the practices and bring it to the games.

“Ultimately, football is about who wants it more. Who’s going to go out there and lay it down on the other team. So I think the physical practices that we’re having now, the more tackling, I think that’s going to be really beneficial for us.”

On the other side of the ball, Kitchens calls the plays now as UNC’s new offensive coordinator.

The Tar Heels’ returning running backs — Davion Gause, Charleston French and Hood — combined for 104 total touches last season, or not even 33 percent of the load that workhorse Omarion Hampton shouldered in 2024, along his bruising path to becoming a first-round choice in the NFL Draft. Hampton authored two of the three most-prolific rushing seasons in Carolina football history. He ran for 1,504 yards and 15 touchdowns across 13 games in 2023, before churning out 1,660 rushing yards and 15 more touchdowns on the ground in 12 games last season.

“Freddie’s a very aggressive coach,” Belichick said. “He wants to have a physical team, physical running game, a physical presence on offense. We just don’t want to run backwards on every play. We want to be aggressive, and we think we have the players to run that type of offense. I’m sure we’re going to have to modify it a little bit. We have good depth at quarterback, and so we’ll see how it all plays out.”