This is today’s Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook as heard on 97.9 WCHL. You can listen to previous Sports Notebooks here.

Gene Chizik sounds good, but can he change a really bad Carolina defense?

UNC’s new defensive coordinator Gene Chizik is all positive in a recent interview with Lee Pace in Extra Points. He won a national championship at Auburn, then got fired, then took two years off, then came to Carolina. So far, so good in everything Chizik says about his Tar Heel experience.

The all-new defensive staff, which Chizik helped Larry Fedora hire, has not only changed the scheme back to a 4-3 but apparently has changed the attitude. They even hired a 31-year-old coach, Tray Scott, who hopefully is a social media whiz since that’s today’s way to communicate with college players and recruits.
Chizik spent the first two days with his defense not talking football, but talking commitment and life. He says he wants he players to be solid citizens off the field and smart, hard-knockers on. Of course, he’s already lost cornerback Malik Simmons to an indefinite suspension for possession of pot and running away from the police. Hopefully, all the other guys will get the hint.

Chizik seems happy, even though his family has remained in Auburn while his kids finish high school. But why not? He gets a fresh start at a school in a different league and has been a great spokesman for how UNC does it the right way after a mistake-filled period before Fedora arrived. He says selling Carolina is not hard, despite some bad publicity still lingering from the NCAA investigation.

And Chizik even has Carolina ties. His deceased father is from Asheville, where he played high school football with Charlie Justice and went off to war with Choo Choo. So Chizik loves to see the statue of Justice outside the football center every day when he comes to work. But whether Chizik and his new defense will be deemed a success is all on the field, beginning Sept. 3 in Charlotte against South Carolina. The initial job of improvement should be easy, since the Tar Heels were among the worst defenses in the ACC and country last season. But making them good enough to contend for a conference championship is a completely different matter. That’s when what Gene Chizik did and didn’t do at Auburn won’t count.

It’s all about building the consistent defense that has been lacking here, save the heyday seasons of Mack Brown and Bill Dooley, for five decades.

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