Countdown to Kickoff: What UNC Dreams May Come
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If acceptance indeed is the first step to healing and recovery, then consider North Carolina unwilling to compromise in regard to its belief for what still remains available to accomplish and achieve this football season.
The Tar Heels have suffered back-to-back upset losses as considerable favorites against what were supposed to be lesser ACC opponents, with UNC squandering double-digit leads in the second halves of both games.
And as Carolina (6-2) steps out of league play and meets FCS program Campbell (4-4) in the first-ever football matchup between the schools on Saturday at Kenan Stadium (noon, ACC Network), it feels like a long way from just two weeks ago, when coach Mack Brown’s Tar Heels had the status of a perfect record and top-10 national ranking — and so many special possibilities seemed at their fingertips.
Any aspirations of an unbeaten run to the ACC championship game and a College Football Playoff breakthrough have crashed and burned. But while plenty damaged, if not fully derailed, UNC isn’t accepting that its fate has been sealed on making a December return to the conference title game.
“The season’s not over with,” UNC receiver J.J. Jones said this week. “It’s a very long season. Like Coach Brown says all the time, college football’s crazy. Anything can happen on any weekend, so we just want to keep working hard, and we know that all of our goals are still intact.
“At the end of the day, all of our goals are still there. We’re just going to keep playing every week.”
Continue playing and add scoreboard watching to the equation, too. The Tar Heels, who don’t reside in the AP Top 25 poll for the first time this season and no longer are keeping pace with Florida State at the top of the ACC standings, have dropped into a three-way tie for fourth place in the league behind Louisville and Virginia Tech (one ACC loss apiece) and unblemished FSU. A Carolina team that’s older and viewed as better in many respects than a season ago will need significant help to work in its favor from across the conference in order to unlock a repeat appearance in the ACC championship game, and also secure a quality bowl berth.
“There wasn’t a doubt in my mind after the Georgia Tech loss (last week) that we weren’t going to reach where we want to go,” UNC edge rusher Kaimon Rucker said this week. “There’s still a lot of opportunity left in the air. We still have a chance to create an impact for this university. That’s our goal and that’s what we still plan to do.”
Whether that’s wishful thinking will be determined in the weeks that follow, but that’s the place where the Tar Heels find themselves after coughing up a 24-14 lead in the second half and losing 31-27 to Virginia (as 23½-point favorites by the oddsmakers) and then blowing leads of 35-24 in the third quarter and 42-32 in the fourth quarter and losing 46-42 at Georgia Tech (as 12-point favorites).
There’s no betting line listed against Campbell, with the Fighting Camels a member of the lower-level FCS. UNC has three ACC games to close the regular season waiting on the other side of Saturday — rival Duke, Clemson and rival NC State. The bulldozing Omarion Hampton likely will have surpassed the 1,000-yard threshold when the Tar Heels resume league play. He’s 77 yards shy of that milestone, and his 115.4 yards per game rank first in the ACC and tied for fourth nationally.
Brown has made it a point this week to mention that star quarterback Drake Maye and standout linebacker Cedric Gray likely have two home games at Kenan Stadium remaining in their Carolina careers before they move on to the NFL, Saturday against Campbell (the first noon kickoff for the Tar Heels since Nov. 5 of last season) and next week against Duke.
The Camels are coached by Mike Minter and in their 16th year as a football program. The school discontinued football after 1950 at the onset of the Korean War, before finally reviving it as a varsity sport in 2008. Brown this week was praising Hajj-Malik Williams, Campbell’s all-time leading passer, before he capped his comments on the quarterback with a remark about his team’s defense, which underlined another area that defines Carolina’s current state of affairs.
“But if I’m them, I come in and try to run the ball,” Brown said of the Camels. “Because until we stop that, we’re not going to win another game.”
Georgia Tech’s 348 rushing yards shredded the Tar Heels and helped spark the field-storming celebration last week at Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta, while marking the most UNC has allowed since November 2018. The Yellow Jackets piled up 246 rushing yards in the fourth quarter alone on 22 attempts, a whopping average of 11.2 yards per carry, on their way to outscoring UNC 22-7 across the final 12:02 of game time.
That night in the postgame, Gray said Carolina looked unprepared on defense and “a lot confused,” clarifying that it wasn’t a little confused. The Tar Heels were charged with a season-worst 14 missed tackles, too, according to data from Pro Football Focus (PFF), prompting UNC defensive coordinator Gene Chizik to say that more tackling drills in open space would be a practice requirement for his unit.
“We’re a veteran defense,” Rucker said this week. “We should know where we’re supposed to fit. But that’s just something that we have to focus on this week, which we are. We don’t know where the confusion came from. We’ve talked about it. I know in the ‘jack’ room, we’ve talked about a little bit of the confusion and the misfits and everything that came with it. And I’m sure that the inside backers did, D-line did, secondary did. So why was there confusion? I don’t know. But we’ve just got to move on from it and make sure that we don’t do it against Campbell.
“We can’t cry over spilled milk. We can only control what we can control. We can control what we’ve got going on this week, and just make sure we get the ‘W’ against Campbell.”
The Tar Heels also have been outscored 56-33 by opponents in the fourth quarter this season, a somewhat surprising stat given the late magic Maye was able to call on in a number of tight finishes last season. But shoring up a suddenly exposed run defense has to be priority No. 1 for UNC with the calendar having turned to November.
On Saturday, Campbell figures to provide Carolina the opportunity to effectively press a reset button and bounce back, regardless of how unharmed or tattered its dreams might be for what’s left of this season.
“In the locker room, no one’s keeping their head down and no one’s feeling sorry for themselves,” UNC offensive lineman William Barnes said this week. “We know we have a goal and we know that we still have everything that we want to do in front of us. We just know that if we let up now, it’s going to turn out to be the same year that we had last year, and no one in the locker room or coaching staff wants that at all to happen.”
