Extra Points: Psycho D

By Lee Pace

Six games into the 2014 college football season, Carolina was 2-4 and its defense was reeling from having allowed point outputs over the previous month of 70 to East Carolina, 50 to Clemson, 34 to Virginia Tech and 50 to Notre Dame. That year, the Tar Heels would be ranked No. 116 in the nation in scoring defense, heaving up 39 points a game.

Meanwhile, 650 miles away in Starkville, Miss., the Mississippi State Bulldogs on the second Sunday of October were anointed as the No. 1 team in college football in both the media and coaches' polls. The Bulldogs were 6-0 and had just bounced Auburn by 15 points with an offense led by QB Dak Prescott and a defense orchestrated around a pre-practice ritual of players getting in a circle and chanting, "Psych-o defense … psych-o defense."

"It's mayhem," sophomore linebacker Beniquez Brown said. "It's juice, excitement, just having fun. Psycho Defense is going crazy for the man beside you."

Consider the contrasts.

That 2014 Tar Heel defense represented a couple of decades worth of Carolina on that side of the ball wandering in the proverbial desert—go backward 10 years and you're giving up 56 points at Virginia and 46 at Utah, go forward nine years and you're letting Georgia Tech jet for 635 yards on a Saturday night in Atlanta. Not since 2009 when Robert Quinn anchored the front line and Carolina placed four defenders on first-team All-ACC have the Tar Heels approached anything resembling dominant defense. That 2009 season is the only year since the Tar Heels' vaunted 1996-97 defenses under Mack Brown 1.0 in Chapel Hill that Carolina has restricted opponents to under 20 points a game.

Meanwhile that year at Mississippi State, coordinator Geoff Collins had acquired the nickname of the "Minister of Mayhem" for the Bulldogs' kamikaze mindset that allowed them to finish No. 23 in the nation in scoring defense at 21.7 and hold the No. 1 spot in the land for five weeks before losing to Alabama. He parlayed that four-year run of success into another coordinator's gig at Florida and led the Gators to top-15 finishes in both total defense and scoring defense in 2015 and 2016.

No wonder Brown was chomping at the bit this week when he introduced Collins as the Tar Heels' new defensive coordinator. In the five years of Brown's second run at Carolina, the Tar Heels have been prolific on offense, averaging 487 yards and 35.6 points a game from 2019-23.

Defense, not so much. Now Brown is hoping that the mindset and structure Collins exhibited at Mississippi State and Florida before head coaching stints at Temple and Georgia Tech will parlay into a more consistent and formidable defense.

"We wanted somebody who's going to be aggressive, simple, create havoc, force more tackles-for-loss, get more sacks," Brown said Monday at a press conference to introduce Collins and new defensive line coach Ted Monachino. "We interviewed five people. One that kept popping up was Geoff Collins. I've coached against Geoff, I know what he does. He makes it very, very difficult for offensive football."

Collins brings a pedigree of having cut his collegiate coaching teeth under George O'Leary at Georgia Tech from 1999-2001 and having run Nick Saban's recruiting operation at Alabama in 2007.

He brings initiative and enterprise, having studied all of Carolina's defensive cutups from the 2023 season before spending six hours on Zoom calls with Brown and the defensive staff during the hiring process.

He brings a boatload of energy stoked with his ever-present Mountain Dews and Energy 5s and a mind that stretches beyond football, having studied psychology as a grad student at Fordham and using Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller Blink for perspective on how the human brain really works—in the office, in the classroom, on the football field.

And he brings that yearning to get into coaching after 15 months away from the game since being dismissed in October 2023 as the Georgia Tech head coach.

"I genuinely missed being a play caller and standing in front of the defense calling plays on college football Saturdays," he said.

Collins comes recommended by three individuals already in Kenan Football Center. Receiver Nate McCollum played for Collins at Georgia Tech and gave Brown a thumbs-up emoji at the idea. General manager Pat Suddes worked with Collins at both Alabama and Tech and says he remembers Collins during their year at Alabama as, "Just a guy that had unlimited energy and unlimited ideas. The dude just had 1,000 ideas every day." Collins and receivers coach Lonnie Galloway played together at Western Carolina in the 1990s.

And it took only 10 minutes into the first Zoom call with Brown and the defensive coaches for Monachino to send Brown a thumbs-up text with the message, "Wow."

"It was impressive," Brown says. "The coaches were all-in. They came to me after and said this guy is exactly what we need."

Now Collins and Monachino, who was a defensive analyst last fall and has 16 years of NFL experience, are new pieces of the puzzle Brown is trying to arrange and get the Tar Heels beyond the eight-to-nine win ceiling that has capped the program. It remains a headscratcher as to why the coaching acumen and two national title rings of previous coordinator Gene Chizik never found their ballast, but suffice it to say that one contrast in the Collins regime will be a much more combative approach.

"We will be aggressive on early downs," he said. "We want to create third-and-longs where most of the turnovers happen. Our terminology and the way we call things will make it very easy for the players to learn so they can play fast, cut them loose, rotate guys in to create depth."

Collins said being away from the coaching business in 2023 allowed him to study games on tape and visit some friends at various spots. He came away with a renewed emphasis on four tenets of good defense: "Be strong up the middle, have the ability to set edges, not allow easy-access throws and affect the QB. We have to build a system and put players in position to do those four things on every snap."

He said his defenses at earlier jobs were predicated on roster makeup and toward that end has asked every defensive staff member (full-time coaches, analysts, graduate assistants) to rank the Tar Heel defenders from No. 1 to No. 25 without regard to position.

"The challenge for me is to put the 11 best players on the field," he said, "to build a system around the players and the philosophy of creating chaos, creating mayhem, getting sacks, getting tackles-for-loss, creating turnovers."

Monachino is familiar with the Tar Heels' defensive personnel and likes that Collins doesn't bring a one-size-fits-all scheme to the grease board. He was asked Monday if attitude was an issue on the 2023 team that saw the Carolina defense go from allowing South Carolina 351 yards in the opener to yielding over 500 to N.C. State in the finale.

"When you look at defensive systems, does that system allow that defensive player to be what he wants to be?" Monachino said. "That solves that attitude issue, right? If I'm giving you an opportunity to make tackles-for-losses and sack the quarterback and bat balls down and make special plays in the run game and the pass rush, then that's what defensive players want to hear. That's the message we're sending. We're going to give them the opportunity they need to let their light shine. And we've got guys that have pretty bright lights."

Good news for sure for a unit that's stumbled in the dark for far too long.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

Players Mentioned

Nate McCollum

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