| Julius Peppers seeks challenges, and he didn’t feel very challenged
during offseason summer conditioning workouts while leading the pack of lineman running
wind sprints. So Peppers took it upon himself to run with the wide receivers and defensive
backs, where he would be held accountable for running eight 300-yard sprints in 55 seconds
with 30 seconds rest between each sprint. Peppers didn’t miss a time, completing the
workout regimen of skill-position players at 6-6, 290 pounds. After team workouts ended,
Peppers was not content. He wanted more and would challenge defensive backs to footraces.
North Carolina strength coach Jeff Connors said Peppers even won some races.
What impressed Connors was Pepper’s commitment to the offseason program. After
redshirting as a freshman, Peppers started all 11 games at defensive end his first season
at North Carolina and then walked on to the Tar Heels’ top-ranked basketball program
two days after the football season ended. Because of his involvement with the basketball
program, where Peppers became a key component in Carolina’s improbable run to the
Final Four, he missed offseason conditioning and spring football practice during his first
two years at Carolina.
With a new football coaching staff being hired prior to Peppers’ junior season, he
decided he wanted to leave an impression on the staff and completely dedicate himself to
football.
He quickly made an impression on Connors, who says Peppers’ genetics are so great
that he looked like he was inflated with an air hose every week after he began training
full-time for football.
"I’ll tell you the same thing that I tell all of the NFL scouts: I think
Julius has an excellent work ethic," Connors said. "He was 100 percent
accountable this summer, which is probably the only summer since he has been here that he
has been required to be here the entire summer. He put on 15 pounds and his strength
levels increased, and he’s the type of athlete that responds very rapidly to
training."
Connors, who has seen the typically reserved Peppers scream at and encourage his
teammates during conditioning drills, deemed Peppers the most athletic individual, for his
size, he’s ever seen.
"He has very few weak points," Connors said. "He’s flexible.
He’s got great feet. He runs very well straight ahead. He’s got great linear
speed. His strength is excellent. His power is excellent. There are very few weaknesses
that the guy has. I mean, they are tough to find. Even the intangibles are strong."
According to Connors, Peppers was clocked at 4.55 on turf in the 40-yard dash before
the season. He recorded a 37.5 vertical jump, bench-pressed 420 pounds, squatted 575
pounds and measured nine percent body fat at 6-6 1/8, 290 pounds.
After witnessing Peppers on the hardwood floor, UNC head basketball coach Matt Doherty
compared Peppers to a circus act, saying there’s no way anyone should be able to get
a body that big up that high in the air.
His high school track coach, Alton Tyre, who watched Michael Jordan when he was coming
through high school, said he has never seen anything that compares to Peppers’
combination of size, speed and quickness in his 24 years of coaching — and probably
would not if he coached for another 24 years.
Connors compares Peppers’ physical ability to Simeon Rice, who Connors witnessed
dominate East Carolina in the 1994 Liberty Bowl when he coached at ECU. Like Rice,
Peppers, 22, combines freakish speed with great size and strength, forcing teams to tame
his presence with double-team blocks.
North Carolina State head coach Chuck Amato explained why the Wolfpack made sure to
designate two blockers for Peppers.
"We’ve got to put two people on him," Amato said. "He’s that
good. You’ve got to slow him down because when he lets it go — wow. Where do you
find somebody who is that tall, that fast and that powerful?"
Amato, a former assistant at Florida State, has seen his share of great defensive
players, including Andre Wadsworth, Corey Simon, Peter Boulware, Reinard Wilson, Jamal
Reynolds and Derrick Alexander. Amato ranks Peppers in the same category as the
Seminoles’ former great pass rushers.
"He’s in their class or they’re in his class," Amato said.
"They’re all at the top of their class."
Like others in that class, Peppers, who finished his career with 30.5 sacks, won the
Lombardi Award given to the country’s top lineman. He finished 10th in the Heisman
Trophy voting in 2001. The highlight of his season came in North Carolina’s 41-9
victory over Florida State, when he recorded an interception, a sack and four tackles for
losses in holding the Seminoles to less than 10 points for just the fifth time in 235
games.
NFL scouts are projecting that Peppers will be the next "Freak," shaped in
the mold of Tennessee DE Jevon Kearse.
"I don’t know if he’s as fast as Jevon is as far as flat out being a
4.4-guy," an NFL scout said. "But he’s definitely going to be a freak
because he’s got cover skills as a defensive end. He can drop back in that zone area.
He has those long arms, and he has those soft hands from playing basketball. So he’s
going to be another type of guy that is going to create different problems for offenses
because his defensive coordinator is probably going to be able to use him in a variety of
ways. You could stand him up and bring him off the edge or you could drop him as a
linebacker because he is that good of an athlete. He is a very fluid athlete. He’s
going to come off the edge and be real effective.
"He’s a pretty powerful guy, and he can run. He can be one of those guys that
get an interception and go the opposite way with it or pick up a fumble like Urlacher did
(last season). He (Peppers) is going to be going down the sideline and not too many guys
are going to be able to catch him. There is a premium on pass rushers, so those types of
guys are going to come off the board fast. When you’re building your team, you
can’t have enough guys that you can pay to come off the edge."
North Carolina defensive coordinator Jon Tenuta says Peppers’ natural ability was
evident in his interception against FSU. Peppers was responsible for the hook zone in
3-coverage. He lined up against a four wide-receiver set, dropped to his zone in the
middle and saw a crossing pattern coming his way. He stepped in front of the crossing
receiver, made a leaping catch and started for the endzone. Peppers, who rushed for 3,501
yards and 46 touchdowns as a tailback in high school and also competed four years in the
triple jump and relays, tried to hurdle a Florida State tackler and nearly did before
getting tripped short of the endzone.
Against Clemson, Peppers shed an offensive tackle, spun, shed another blocker, jumped
to bat down a pass and then made a diving grab of the deflection. Against Oklahoma, he
snagged a screen pass and returned it 29 yards for a touchdown. Not many defensive ends
lead their team in interceptions, but Peppers did with three picks.
After leading the nation with 15 sacks as a sophomore, just one shy of the North
Carolina record set by Lawrence Taylor in 1980, Peppers was held to 8.5 sacks in 2001.
While his production dropped from his sophomore season, defensive ends coach James Webster
said the decrease due to the extra attention and game plans devised to contain Peppers.
"Julius saw double-teams on practically every game we played this year,"
Webster said. "Everybody was double-teaming him. Everybody had a back that went to
his side and was chipping him before releasing. He got a lot of attention."
Tenuta said Peppers received so much attention that the Tar Heels varied his duties
— moving him from rushing one side of the line to the other to dropping back in pass
coverage to blitzing — and were able to free up other defenders by using Peppers as a
"smokescreen," a decoy to deploy extra blockers.
Tenuta said Peppers’ tremendous vision, which he attributes to playing basketball,
and his ability to rush the passer are his premium qualities. With Peppers’
combination of size and speed, Tenuta thinks he could be successful playing a number of
positions at the next level.
"I don’t think he can be a free safety," Tenuta said, "but I mean
he can play outside linebacker or defensive end. Wherever you want him to rush, he can
rush from any spot up front. He’s a pretty talented kid that way. With a couple of
years of development and figuring out how to attack certain guys, which I know he can do
because he studies film, he’ll be as good as he wants to be."
Webster thinks he has the ability to become a threat offensively as well.
"The kid is a phenomenal athlete," Webster said. "He really is. He
played tailback in high school. He has great hands. He’ll catch anything that comes
near him. He could be a great tight end in the pros."
While Tenuta sees a huge upside to Peppers’ potential, he does not think Peppers
has established himself as a great run player yet.
After arriving on campus and breaking down film, Webster identified two areas where he
expected Peppers to improve — stopping the run and rushing the passer inside.
Webster says Peppers’ speed and quickness make it very difficult to beat Peppers
around the corner. However, he noticed a flaw in Peppers’ technique playing inside.
Webster explained what he told Peppers after watching him on film.
"We talked about using his hands more," Webster said. "We talked a
little more about playing with leverage. And instead of trying to slip the block, we
talked about sitting there and playing the block. A lot of times, he wanted to slip the
block to the outside and use his speed and quickness, which is fine, but sometimes it is
not to the benefit of the defense to slip outside. Sometimes, it’s beneficial to stay
in there, dig down, hold your ground and squeeze the gap."
Webster noted that it was difficult to coach Peppers to squeeze the run when he had the
athletic ability to slip blocks to the outside, come back inside and still make tackles
for no gain. By correcting his technique and adhering to the team’s defense, Webster
said Peppers has added another dimension to his game.
"I think his not playing the run on the inside wasn’t because he didn’t
want to or because he wasn’t strong enough or afraid," Webster said, "he
just wasn’t using the proper technique. Once he learned that technique, he became a
force inside."
But the Georgia Tech game film is still circulating among NFL franchises with top
picks, when Peppers displayed a lackluster performance in a nationally televised game. The
Tar Heels were coming off a bye week after five consecutive wins and were playing the
Yellow Jackets on an oddly scheduled Thursday night. Tenuta acknowledged that
Peppers’ pursuit was not where he wanted it.
"He didn’t play with the tenacity that we’d like to see in that
game," Tenuta said. "His pursuit was not where we wanted it to be in the Georgia
Tech and Wake Forest games."
An NFL scout agreed that Peppers had difficulty stopping the run.
"Yeah, that’s not his thing," the scout said. "He’s going to
have to develop that part of his game, but people scheme so much nowadays in the NFL, you
could probably cover it up and just let him be an athlete and run around and make plays.
That’s what he does as far as being an athlete. But he’s not a point-of-attack
type guy.
"He’s got shut down a couple of times. Different teams have shut him down
effectively, locked him down, have a back chipped on him — I think Texas did that
when they played him. They had a young tackle that did a pretty good job against him and
then they changed up and chipped the back coming out. If the tackle couldn’t control
him, they would have the back come up and chip him on the outside and keep banged at him,
just kind of keep him off-pace so he couldn’t have a clean speed rush off the
edge."
Webster said there were a couple games at midseason where he expected more from Peppers
but did not see it the rest of the season.
"There was a game or two where I did not think that some of the things he had
learned had carried over to the field, but he learned from that," Webster said.
"I made Julius Peppers play against the run a lot more in practice. I think what we
did a lot more physical work in practice, we did a lot more hitting in practice, probably
more than what he was used to. I was very demanding as far as when the ball is thrown, to
turn and run and not be a spectator — very demanding of making Julius finish off
plays.
"And everything I asked him to do, he did it. He never complained. He never
questioned it. He never backed down. He hustled to the ball. He gave great effort in
practice and I think as a result of that, it carries over to the football field."
According to Webster, Peppers’ receptiveness to coaching is his most remarkable
trait.
"I’m not really sure how demanding people were of Julius Peppers,"
Webster said. "But I do know this: I’m a very demanding coach. I’ve gotten
in Julius Peppers’ face, and I mean, really chewed his butt out about things that he
wasn’t doing that I thought he should have been doing. And I have seen guys shut it
down, at the caliber of player that Julius Peppers is. Julius Peppers never did that. And
I can assure you I have ripped him up and down right in his face, and he has responded. He
has listened. He didn’t give an attitude. He went out and did what I asked him to
do."
Peppers’ humility and hard work left an impression on Connors as well.
"I got here in January, and it was very important to me that Julius be part of the
group this summer," Connors said. "Just because he is Julius Peppers
doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to do everything everyone else does. And I talked
to him about that because I really didn’t know what to expect because of all the
visibility that he has received. I was pleasantly surprised. He really took it upon
himself to show up every day, to work very hard and to be accountable. I thought he had a
very positive spirit. A lot of times, guys with that type of visibility want to do their
own thing. I never had any problems with him. In fact, I thought he was a great asset to
us because the other players see that kind of effort and accountability from him reinforce
what we are trying to do as a program."
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