University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Tar Heels Break Noles
September 23, 2001 | Football
Sept. 23, 2001
By Adam Lucas
TarHeelBlue.com
Things you absolutely, positively, never thought you'd see in Chapel Hill:
1. An unpleasant spring day.
2. A Clemson basketball team winning a game.
3. The North Carolina third-string quarterback downing the ball in an attempt not to run the score up on Florida State.
Much will be written about the proper reaction to Carolina's 41-9 thrashing (yes, it was a thrashing) of Florida State. But there is only one proper reaction: "Say what?"
Many fans woke up Saturday morning expecting to hear the haunting tones of the tomahawk chop rolling over Kenan Stadium around 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon. But they didn't expect it to be a mocking, jeering version of the chant performed by 53,000 incredulous spectators.
Last season, the Seminoles hung 63 points on the Heels. This year, they didn't even sniff the end zone in the second half.
"It really feels great to be on the other side of the stick this time," linebacker David Thornton said. "We've been there at their first home game and they really wanted to embarrass us and they just wanted to blow us out as bad as possible."
Blow Florida State out? In football? What is this, a football school? Carolina handed the Seminoles their worst regular-season loss in 16 years.
Remember how easy it all felt in 1992, when the Tar Heels gave top-20 Virginia and top-20 Georgia Tech back-to-back losses? Football was becoming a birthright then, becoming something UNC was supposed to win.
In that way, the suffering of the past couple years may have actually enhanced Saturday's game. Many fans sat in the same seats they occupied when Furman swaggered-well, they didn't swagger, they more meandered-into Chapel Hill and handed Carolina a 28-3 whipping. Those seats have seen losses to Miami of Ohio, Wake Forest, and Houston.
They've now also seen a waxing of a program that had lost only two games since joining the ACC.
There was a gnawing feeling coming into this game that maybe playing FSU wasn't as special as it used to be. In previous years, it was the toughest ticket in town. This year, fans stood outside the Kenan Stadium gates with fistfuls of tickets.
As it turned out, the luster was off the Seminoles for a different reason. Carolina had already played Texas, already played Oklahoma. Florida State wasn't their first and only crack at the nation's best. It was just another game.
"On defense, we felt like we could dominate their offense from the first play of the game," Thornton said.
Carolina has talked like that before. But they have never had the confidence to go out and do it.
Actually, it shouldn't have been much of a shock that the Heels put up a solid defensive effort. In years past, they've always had the speed and defense to play with FSU. Even in the biggest dud in recent Kenan Stadium history, a 20-3 loss to FSU in 1997, the defense played well enough to provide a victory.
What Carolina hadn't had were breaks and offense. They got breaks on Saturday, which led to offense.
For three straight weeks, the Heels had found themselves having to engineer lengthy drives in order to score. This week, they finally got to play on the short field that their opponents had enjoyed so far in 2001.
And then there were the quarterbacks. Ronald Curry played a mediocre first half and had the crowd howling for Darian Durant. Durant came in to start the second half and promptly flung a 52-yard touchdown pass to Chesley Borders. Given the way the season had gone so far, there was a mighty exhale in Kenan when Borders finally located the ball and hauled it in.
But even Curry, when he got back in the game, played well enough. For the first time this year, he looked like a quarterback just trying to win, not trying to score a touchdown on every play.
Carolina's 41 points were more than the point total scored by Florida State in seven of the team's previous nine ACC meetings.
About the only thing that went wrong was the goalposts. OK, those goalposts have been there since they were torn down against Georgia Tech in 1992. Maybe school administrators had already added rock-solid concrete in preparation for the always-treacherous ECU Pirates coming to town in two weeks.
But the way the students went about trying to get the goalposts down, it looked like they were made out of cast iron. Finally, nearly an hour later, one set of goalposts came down. By then, most of the kids hanging off them were having trouble remembering who won the game.
Who knows? Maybe they'll even get more chances to practice. Stranger things have happened.
And Coach Doherty, watch out for Clemson this year.
ALSO BY ADAM LUCAS
Adam Lucas is the co-publisher of Basketball America. He is a lifelong observer of UNC sports and can be reached at JAdamLucas@aol.com.
