University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A New Attitude
December 13, 2004 | Football
Dec. 13, 2004
By Adam Lucas
If you don't look closely, you miss it.
Everything looks the same in the Kenan Football Center. Same chairs, same pictures on the walls, same people inhabiting the building. Last week, a selection of players and head coach John Bunting met with the media, and they were decked out in the usual college-student-going-through-exams gear (except Bunting, who was clad in the typical football coach ensemble, complete with Continental Tire Bowl hat).
But despite all the similarities, something seemed...different. These were the same players, yes, but they sat differently. So many times in Kenan Stadium since 2002 they've had to meet the media looking world-weary. After the Louisville game, they sat slumped or hunched over, seemingly unable to bear the weight that was crushing them.
They don't slump anymore. They almost perch in their chairs. They look like they are having fun. They look like they would welcome a game against most any opponent at any time you'd care to schedule it. They look, well, confident.
"The way this team has come together gives you a little bit of cockiness," sophomore wide receiver Jesse Holley said. "We beat State. We beat Miami. We beat Wake. We got our Bell back. That gives us a little bit of cockiness. It's not a bad cockiness. It's not arrogance.
"It's that thing you want to see in a football player. That certain swagger, that hop in your step. A lot of guys have been shown what it takes to be a good team and finish, and that's what this program is about."
That certain swagger was completely absent after Carolina traveled to Utah and absorbed a 46-16 whipping at the hands of the Utes, a loss that Holley said made it embarrassing to walk around the Chapel Hill campus in the days to come. Three players had been suspended from the team. A long bye week was ahead, followed by a game against Miami. At practice on the Monday after the Utah game, the Heels had so many players wearing red (injured) jerseys Bunting compared them to the British army. This was a good time to start digging a shallow grave for the 2004 Carolina football season.
But something happened.
"My freshman year we had a lot of guys with negative attitudes who talked badly about the program," Holley said. "When you're a young player, and you hear people in the locker room say we're a bad program, you start to think, `Are we really a bad program?'
"This year, our seniors wouldn't let this team fold. To let everything go downhill after a loss like that would've been a detriment to this program. We had worked too hard and knew the talent we had on this team...We adjusted to what we had. We knew we could either turn things around or we could poop in our hats and call it another miserable season. I know the seniors didn't want to poop in their hats. They wanted to go out on top."
They don't seem to be particularly amazed by the turnaround they've engineered, by the way they went from 3-4 and staring at one of the nation's most unforgiving schedules to inspiring almost 30,000 Tar Heel fans (at last count) to alter their holiday plans to attend the Continental Tire Bowl. From all appearances, it's exactly what they expected to happen.
The tiniest glimmer into what it must have felt like to inhabit one of the field-facing offices at Kenan during those gloomy weeks comes from John Bunting.
"People were talking, whether it was the media or other recruiters, and they said this staff was a lame-duck staff," John Bunting said. "They use that. I know who they are. That's been hard, but I knew we were going to get it done and we would show people we'd have a new contract at the end of this year.
"They were wrong. We were right. It feels good to me."
The refreshing thing about these Tar Heels is this: the cockiness they've acquired isn't of the variety that makes them believe they can spend the offseason polishing their bowl jewelry. The late-season success has whetted the appetite, not satiated it.
"After the bowl game is over, win or lose, we're going to be happy we went to a bowl game but that's done," Holley said. "Now we look forward to next year, to getting that recruiting class together and getting guys in to replace the guys we lose this year.
"We're a 6-5 team that is on the up. We want to be 7-5. And we're going to continue this momentum into the spring and into training camp."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. His book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about the book, click here.
