UNC Game Week: Freddie Kitchens Q&A Ahead of Trip to Cal

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens met with reporters on Wednesday at the Kenan Football Center, ahead of the team’s trip to the West Coast for an ACC football matchup on Friday night at California.

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The Tar Heels (2-3 overall, 0-1 ACC) play the Golden Bears (4-2, 1-1) at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., and kickoff is scheduled for 10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m. local time).

Watch Kitchens’ question-and-answer session in its entirety below, and scroll down to read some noteworthy excerpts from his comments.

How would you assess this team’s offense so far through five games?

Kitchens: “I think some of the progress we’ve made hasn’t shown up on the scoreboard, but I think we have made progress. If you go back and look at TCU, moving on to Charlotte, moving on to Richmond, UCF, and now Clemson, I think we’ve made progress. Doesn’t always show up on the scoreboard, but we’ve made progress in different areas, and we just need to continue to stay where our feet are and get better each and every day. And eventually we’ll get the results that we want.”

What are some specific areas of progress over the last few weeks and this latest bye week?

Kitchens: “I think the communication has gotten better, from the standpoint of the quarterback to the line, the line to the backs, the receivers to the quarterback. There’s communication all over the field that happens every play. I think that communication has gotten better, definitely, which increases your chance to be successful on an individual play. And then you string enough of those together, and you get success. And we really can cut this thing down into drives or plays or whatever, but each and every play is its own entity and has a different set of problems or a different set of communication rules and things like that, and then you get that going. But if you have a misstep along the way, that’s how you get sometimes bogged down and don’t have the result that you want.”

Too what extent have there been conversations about changing who’s calling the plays in an effort to jump-start this offense?

Kitchens: “That’s never been brought up, never been discussed. I think we always look to see how we can get better each and every day that we go out to practice. And each game day and all that kind of stuff, we come out and re-evaluate things, and go from there. So there’s, of course, things I could have done better. I think we can say that all the way down the line, but sometimes you just got to keep your head down and go to work and try to get better.”

As an assistant on the staff from last season, has the head-coaching change caused any friction between the Mack Brown holdover players and the new guys who were brought in?

Kitchens: “I don’t see it from that standpoint. What I see is a bunch of guys trying to come together and be one team. I’ve seen that from the very beginning, and they’re working hard at doing that. And they’ve gotten better at that, and they’ve increased that. But I think everybody here tries to work hard and tries to do the right thing.”

Has there been a giant culture shift between the way Mack Brown ran the program and Bill Belichick is running the program?

Kitchens: “You’re talking about two totally different people there, just like I’m pretty sure my coaching style is not like a lot of people’s coaching style. So I don’t want to get into a comparison or anything like that. They’re different people. They’ve had different experiences, but both of them are very successful. So I try to learn from everybody I coach for, and I’ve been very fortunate to have coached underneath both those guys.”