College football is having an interesting day so far. At the time of writing this article, Syracuse is beating Clemson in Death Valley at halftime, which hopefully will set the stage for some more chaos as the day progresses. Let’s just hope that chaos misses the Tar Heels while they are in Florida to take on UCF. UNC is currently on a two-game win streak after taking down Charlotte and Richmond, while the Knights have their own two-win streak thanks to wins over North Carolina A&T and Jacksonville
State.
When looking at the Tar Heels specifically, all eyes will be on the offense once again as they try to prove that they have some teeth that can get the job done against stiff competition. While things went relatively well against Richmond, beating a FCS team isn’t going to do enough to convince anybody that we’re witnessing improvement. Things are still really dark when looking at the offensive ratings — they are one of the worst teams in the country in the metrics right now despite scoring 41 points against the Spiders. That’s pretty bad, to say the least, so we’ll have to see what Freddie Kitchens and Bill Belichick has up their sleeve to get this group going. It’ll also be interesting to see if Gio Lopez makes it through the entire game today without Belichick trying something different. He hasn’t looked very good to this point in the season, but maybe he’ll be able to show us something today. Maybe.
If fans are looking for some optimism, UNC’s defense has been pretty impressive over the last couple of games. Charlotte and Richmond aren’t exactly offensive powerhouses, but we’ve seen Carolina defenses give up more points to worse teams before. Here’s the problem, though: the TCU game still happened, and so figuring out how to truly evaluate this group is tough. UCF should be a decent enough challenge for this group so that we can truly figure out what Belichick has. There’s no doubt that this group looked really confident during the Richmond game, so hopefully that carries over into this afternoon’s matchup.
As always, we will be back after today’s game with some post-game analysis and takes. Until then, Go Heels!
