University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Home Stand
November 8, 2004 | Football
Nov. 8, 2004
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by Lee Pace
The microscope on Saturday's 27-24 loss to Virginia Tech reveals the following:
* Seven penalties on the Tar Heels. Two of them came on the defense early in the game to greatly assist the Hokies' first score. Two more followed on special teams and the offense to put the Heels into a field-position hole to open the second half.
"One of the reasons we've had some success this year is we've been penalty free," Tar Heel coach John Bunting said. "We've played smart and disciplined. Today we had seven. That's not many, but they came at critical times."
* A debilitating sack on quarterback Darian Durant on third-and-nine late in the game as the Tar Heels were driving for a potential tying field goal. Durant looked downfield, didn't like the look of his primary receiver, Jarwarski Pollock, and then glanced to his right in the flat, where Chad Scott was wide open. But Scott had yet to swivel his head toward Durant, so the quarterback held the ball an instant too long and was tackled from behind by Jim Davis. The 11-yard loss turned a 43-yard field-goal try into a 54-yard effort.
"Maybe I took too many steps before I looked back," Scott said.
"I should have anticipated and just thrown it," Durant said. "But there's no room for shoulda, coulda, woulda."
* A 54-yard field goal by Connor Barth into a swirling wind with 1:09 to play that fell about five yards short.
"He's made plenty from 57 yards," Bunting said. "He can make that. When the ball took off, I really thought it was there."
"I guess the wind up top was a little harder than it was on the ground," Barth said. "I thought it was going in, but then it died down and fell short."
* A special teams effort that got the better of the vaunted and respected Virginia Tech kicking game. Special teams coordinator James Webster called for a punt-block attempt (versus playing soft on the rush and setting up a return) in the fourth quarter, and the Heels popped Tom O'Leary through the middle for a block that D.J. Walker recovered for a touchdown. Carolina also added wrinkles to its return game this week, using fake reverses to help break a Trimane Goddard kickoff return for 46 yards and a Jarwarski Pollock punt return for 28.
"I'm very pleased with the way our special teams stood up to this challenge of playing the great Virginia Tech special teams," Bunting said. "The punt block was a big, big play. Our kids on special teams really played hard and they executed well."
* A Carolina defense that held Tech to 370 yards -- an average of 5.4 yards a snap, the lowest total of the season -- but was nonetheless soft in tackling Mike Imoh on occasion and was too often flustered by Tech's frequent misdirection plays.
"We have to be more aggressive on defense," Bunting said. "We did not respond as well as we needed to with the misdirection stuff. We were entirely too soft with some of our coverage, we didn't tackle well, we didn't tackle the catch. That's got to be addressed, and it will."
* And a spirited fourth-quarter rally after Tech had taken control of the game in the second and third quarters and had mounted a 27-14 lead.
"They had like 26 yards total offense in the fourth quarter," Bunting said. "That's good, particularly since they wiped us out the first three."
"I'm just happy with the fight in our team," safety Gerald Sensabaugh added. "We never gave up." That's the fine print. Pull back into a macroscopic view and you find the Tar Heels, two weeks in succession, battling a perennial powerhouse to the final gun with a chance to win. The truth is that the Tar Heels could have lost to Miami a week ago and then bounced back to trim the Hokies on Saturday; both games were that close. Sixteen months ago, when Miami and Virginia Tech were admitted to the ACC, two losses immediately popped onto the Heels' 2004 won-loss record in the minds of 99.9 percent of the sporting populace. But the Tar Heels are getting better as the year evolves; flop Miami and Virginia in the Carolina schedule, and you might well have the Heels getting pounded in Miami back in early September and then being competitive with the Cavaliers in November.
"This game just shows you how close we're getting to where we want to be," Bunting said. "We're one or two plays away from winning this football game. To be in these two games in the fourth quarter, I don't think anybody thought we would. But we did."
"I think we're a much smarter football team now," Sensabaugh added. "Before, in our first few games, we made mistakes that don't happen now. For the most part, we've gotten more fundamentally sound within the defense. I think everybody understands their role now, and we have a have a lot of faith in our defense."
After losing all six home games in 2002 and five of six in 2003, the Tar Heels are making Kenan Stadium a fun destination again on Saturdays. This year they were 4-2: Acceptable opening win against William & Mary, albeit blemished somewhat by four turnovers; eye-opening victory over Georgia Tech following the implosion at Virginia; miserable second-half effort against Louisville when Durant and his receivers couldn't connect and the defense yielded scads of yards on missed tackles; emotional and intense win over N.C. State, headlined by the goal-line stand and T.A. McLendon fumble; complete team effort in stunning No. 3 Miami, capped by Barth's winning field goal and the fans' orgy of celebration afterward; and a tense struggle with VPI that could have gone either way.
"We've had an exciting year in Kenan," Bunting said. "Even the Louisville game was just 10-0 at halftime. We played exciting football. Our fans had an unbelievable fall watching us play. They stormed the field twice, took the goal posts down once. We had some great night games here--Georgia Tech, N.C. State and Miami. I think our fans are excited about the improvement they saw and the future of our program."
Saturday was brisk and crystal clear, a perfect day for football, and 58,000 fans enjoyed the entertainment. Dollars were peeled off 24/7 over the weekend for parking, programs, concessions, Double Gamblers at The Rat, beverages along Franklin Street and hotel rooms from Burlington to RTP. Tech brought thousands of orange-and-garnet clad fans, and their eruption as their team took the field pre-game jolted my ears and concentration just I was beginning to deliver my key to the game on the Tar Heel Sports Network. The Carolina student body was late arriving -- nothing unusual about that for an early start -- but as the Tar Heels began mounting their rally in the fourth quarter, the Tar Heel faithful made enough noise to force Hokie QB Bryan Randall into a timeout. It all seemed eons away from two Novembers ago, when Clemson and Maryland came to Kenan Stadium on successive weekends amid bitter winds and sparse crowds and chopped the Heels to hash.
The saddest element was that five fifth-year seniors could not have made their final Kenan experience a winning one. Durant, Madison Hedgecock, Willie McNeill, Jonas Seawright and Skip Seagraves were the only remaining members of the class who opted for coach Carl Torbush's program in February, 2000, in the aftermath of the controversy laden 3-8 season of 1999. Fifteen additional players played their last game as well, including three recruited players from the Torbush-Bunting bridge class who played as true freshmen in 2001 -- Jason Brown, Jocques Dumas and Jacque Lewis.
"My feelings are hurt coming up short," Seawright said. "I wanted to leave it all on the field for the Heels. We lost, but we fought to the very end, we played our behinds off."
"We still have so much to look forward to," Brown added. "We have two big games left. They might not be here at Kenan. But if we put together two good weeks, we can still have a winning season. There's still so much hope for our program."
The ever-consistent Bunting at no point following the Miami victory hinted that the Tar Heels had "arrived" and in fact was quick to shoot down a reporter's query last week that suggested the Heels might have "gelled." When the media is hinting that Armageddon's at hand when you lose to Louisville and Utah, Bunting merely says that's one loss -- and only one loss. You go back to work and try to get better. The flip side is that now Bunting refuses to bathe in the glow of a supposed "moral victory" over Virginia Tech when the media has now shifted like the wind into that direction.
"It still counts as one loss, just as I've said after enormous, lopsided losses," he says. "We wanted to beat another Top 20 team, and we had the opportunities. To let it get away is very, very frustrating. It was frustrating Saturday night. I barely slept all night. It sets in again Sunday morning. Then you come into the office and watch the tape and get frustrated again."
I'll say this: 27-24 frustration versus Virginia Tech in front of 58,000 raucous fans is light years from 59-7 frustration versus Maryland -- a 2002 game in front of shiny metal stands best remembered for the Tar Heels getting three different penalty flags on one snap of the football.
Send your questions about Tar Heel football to Lee Pace at lpace@nc.rr.com . Please include your first and last names and hometown. His Q&A column will appear each Friday during the season.
