Welcome to another podcast by Inside Carolina.com, the independent voice of UNC Sports, your home for Tar Heel football, basketball, and recruiting.

Welcome to the Inside Carolina podcast. John Siegley here with Mike Ingersoll and E.J. Wilson talking some U.N.C. football.

So, guys, it has been a long offseason so far. It's been a while since all three of us got

together to talk, but the winter workouts are about to get started. So let's go ahead and just start

there. You know, E.J, since you were a little bit late to join the podcast due to some

technical difficulties, I'll give you the benefit of starting first here, man. So on the defensive

side of the ball, you know, when you guys were going through winter break in December, early

January, you know, what was kind of the process for you guys when it came time to look around

and say, oh, crap, when to workout starting

like a week or two. Maybe we should start getting back on the treadmill and, you know, stop

eating out so much. That was a big issue for us, my first two years playing because we weren't

in any bowl game. So we hadn't played football really since around Thanksgiving, since Thanksgiving

weekend.

So we were notorious, especially the defensive line and Mike can attest it.

We were notorious for just being fat, just going home, not doing anything, just being high school, Harry's been the heroes of the towns we were when we grew up in because, I mean, most of us came from small towns.

So we didn't really do much.

Luckily, when we were playing in bowl games, we always played the ones we did play.

We played after Christmas.

So it's a lot easier to motivate yourself to stay in shape.

I mean, because you did kind of taste a little bit of success by having the right to

play in a bowl game.

But you also have that sting of loss and that sting of being so close. So it kind of motivates you to when you go home to do a little bit more. And plus, you only have a week where you're not really being active. So I didn't affect me as much. But it does kind of come up on you fast. And I know if you're not prepared for it, it will be painful. Mike, what about you guys on the offensive line? Do you guys also maybe put on a couple extra Christmas pounds there, like the defensive guys were doing? Yeah, EJ makes a really good point. The first couple of years for us, you know, we didn't have a, we didn't have a bowl game in 06 or 07.

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