For the second week in a row, the Tar Heels had a chance to win the game late and were right at the edge of the goal line with it in their hands. Also for the second week in a row, they failed to get across the line, causing their opponent to win. For the second heartbreaking week in a row, a goal-line fumble ended up swinging the outcome in favor of the bad guys.
On defense there’s a lot to like of the performance for Carolina, as the media is not going to be impressed with Virginia’s appearance
after they squeaked out a 17-16 win against the Tar Heels Saturday. The offense, though, showed a lot of the same issues they’ve had all season. All of this played out on a beautiful October day in front of a less-than-enthusiastic home crowd.
Let’s talk about three takeaways from Carolina’s latest loss.
Defense does the job
It’s tough to fault the defense for the job they did against the potent Virginia offense. Last week was the first time they had failed to cross 20 points and every other game was easily over 30. Against the Tar Heel defense, they only managed 10 until overtime, and even en route to that number on that they enjoyed a fairly beneficial spot from the officials. Generally, though any time you only give up 10 points as a defense you should expect to win. Carolina got an astounding six sacks on Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris and forced an interception, something that has been rare by the Tar Heel secondary this season. The one touchdown was on a drive that the Cavaliers were used to — quick and capped off with a big play, but it was also the only drive that looked like the offense we’ve seen so far this season from Virginia. There also should have been a second interception in there, but the Heels were called for a deeply questionable pass interference on fourth down that kept a drive going.
The numbers say that Carolina’s defense has been in the lower third in the country, but in watching the games, those numbers are heavily skewed by the offense’s failures in TCU and UCF to where they got worn down, and then of course the Clemon throat punch. They managed to keep the team in the game against Cal last week and against an ACC title contender this week. They truly deserved better, the question is whether or not they’ll keep this up against two really bad ACC teams in Syracuse and Stanford to continue this momentum.
There is no hope for the offense
The offense just kept shooting itself in the foot, and this included not being able to take advantage of a good drive by once again fumbling inches from the end zone, turning the ball over on the way in again and turning a possible six points to zilch. Saturday it was the usually reliable Kobe Paysour just trying to do a little too much, reaching for the pylon as he was going out of bounds. Corey Costner for the Cavs managed to knock the ball loose, and it went forward over the pylon and then out of bounds when it was in the end zone, resulting in one of the worst rules in football coming into effect.
Yes, I know this is debatable for some folks and we don’t need to go round and round about it; you can’t change my mind that it’s dumb that the defense can gain possession of the ball without actually ever possessing it.
The offense from there mostly just didn’t click. They did manage to get one touchdown in regulation, as Paysour made up for his mistake by hauling in a pass from Gio Lopez and scoring. Lopez was intercepted twice, both times deep in Virginia territory, taking points off the board. Meanwhile the running game only managed 145 yards, and some of that was aided by the overtime stats padding things. Bill Belichick and Freddie Kitchens clearly have next to zero confidence in the offense, choosing to punt on any questionable fourth down play in UVA territory and also slow-rolling the end of the first half to go for a field goal that ultimately failed. Even the two point try wasn’t so much about confidence in the offense — the call to go for it was good, but the play was about as vanilla as possible.
At this point, it’s clear Carolina is spinning its wheels on that side of the ball until the last four games of the year when one of the freshmen can get under center and not burn a redshirt year. Next week’s game against Syracuse may be one of the worst offensive displays in the ACC this season.
The fanbase is done with football
A sign that the crowd inside Kenan Stadium was going to be light could be found on Seat Geek before the game. The secondary ticket market site where most UNC fans will now go to resell their tickets, thanks to the partnership with the school, listed tickets for as low as $17 with fees. Some of this had to do with the lack of travel by the Virginia fan base — and it’s tough to blame them for not being believers at this time — but still, the map showed tickets all around the stadium for a game that was sold out before the season began.
A lot of those tickets appeared to go unused as the crowd at kickoff was not good.
Now, as the game stayed competitive, at least the student section filled out a little bit.
It does go to show just how wasted an opportunity this was for UNC football. The desire is there for the team to be relevant, but fans that have already paid for tickets are opting to just stay home rather than sink more money into parking, concessions, and whatnot. In the end, more crowd shots like that may be what could sink the current coaching staff; if they continue to lose out on revenue by keeping this staff, it may be turn out cheaper to just cut bait than continue to deal with this loss.
