USC's Cooper interviews for position with Heels

COLUMBIA — South Carolina secondary coach Ron Cooper interviewed Wednesday to become the North Carolina football team's new defensive coordinator, a source confirmed Thursday.

UNC needs a coordinator because Chuck Pagano left last week to join the Baltimore Ravens new staff.

Cooper has been at USC since '04, one of only two holdovers from the Lou Holtz era. Quarterbacks coach David Reaves is the other.

Led by All-SEC selections Emanuel Cook and Captain Munnerlyn, Cooper might've had his best secondary unit this past season.

After bouncing between first and second most of the season in pass defense, the 6-6 Gamecocks wound up fourth in the country in the category (168.8 yards a game).

Cooper didn't immediately respond to a voicemail left Thursday afternoon. Prior to arriving at USC, Cooper was 44-56 as a head coach at Eastern Michigan, Louisville and Alabama A&M.

By all accounts, if Cooper were to get the Tar Heels job, the front-runner to take over for him would be Arkansas secondary coach Lorenzo Ward.

Ward and new USC defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson have been friends for some time — since Ward played for a Johnson-coached defense at Alabama in the late 1980s — and they'd long planned to coach together this season. The plan was to do that at Arkansas, but Johnson left for USC after Brian VanGorder did an about face and returned to the Atlanta Falcons.

Johnson wanted to get Ward to Columbia when he was hired, but the Gamecocks already had a full complement of assistants.