University of North Carolina Athletics
EXTRA POINTS: Tar Heels Misfire On Offense As Cardinals Coast
September 27, 2004 | Football
Sept. 27, 2004
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By Lee Pace
When your defense is trying to stop a team so multi-faceted it lists 15 starters on its pre-game depth chart;
When your defense is playing nine players either as first-year starters or first-year players at new positions;
When your defense is beginning to show some sparks of progress after a sturdy performance the week before, replete with big stops on third down and five forced turnovers (including one on the punt team);
The last thing you need is for your offense to sputter, stutter, stammer and stumble.
But that's exactly what happened Saturday on a sun-splashed afternoon in Kenan Stadium. Quarterback Darian Durant and the Tar Heel offense played abysmally in front of nearly 50,000 fans. They made errant throws. They dropped passes. They missed blocking assignments. So inept was the Tar Heel attack that the defense was put under pressure all afternoon. The result was a 34-0 win by an excellent University of Louisville team -- but a team that certainly should have received a stiffer challenge from the Tar Heels.
"We went out and stunk the joint up," Tar Heel coach John Bunting said of Carolina's second-half performance.
"If you're a good team, you go out with consistency and execute week after week," center Jason Brown said. "We're not there yet."
"We were just kind of sitting back and waiting for things to happen," receiver Adarius Bowman added. "We need to go out and make things happen."
The Tar Heels had their chances to make things happen.
* Durant was a little low aiming a third-down pass to Jarwarski Pollock on Carolina's first possession, and Pollock couldn't make a diving catch that would have kept the drive going at the Louisville 31.
* Durant was high in throwing to Chad Scott on the Heels' second possession; Scott was open at Cardinal 15 on a flag route, and the incompletion led to a punt.
* The Tar Heel blocking front failed to pick up a blitzing Cardinal on third down on Carolina's third possession, forcing Durant to hurry his throw and badly miss Scott. Instead the ball was intercepted by Louisville, garroting the Heels' threat at the Cardinal 21.
* The Tar Heels missed assignments on a second-down shovel pass and third-down screen pass on their first series of the second half. Both plays were stuffed on a possession demanding some success to stem Louisville's first-half momentum.
"It was just a bad game," a crestfallen Durant said. "It was a total team effort. A lot of times, I just didn't put the ball out there. I'm never one to point fingers. It was just frustrating that we didn't get the job done."
"They play an aggressive defense and they gave us opportunities," Bunting said. "We took some shots downfield but we just didn't connect. You've got to take advantage of those opportunities. We had plenty of opportunities to make plays. If we had made some, the game could have been quite different."
Success on any of those plays might have led to Carolina points, to something a little different than the 10-0 Louisville edge at halftime and early in the third quarter. Louisville's vaunted offense was as good as advertised, and it was methodical and precise in a 14-play march to open the game and put the Cardinals on the board at 7-0. Carolina's defense, still hunting-and-pecking to find the right personnel at a handful of positions, stiffened and reduced the Cardinals' second possession to a field goal.
But with the Cardinals leading 10-0 early in the second quarter, Louisville had occupied the football for 11 minutes, 26 seconds to Carolina's four minutes, 52 seconds. The Tar Heel offense sat on the sidelines, getting hot and getting stiff and getting bored. When it came time to play, they were hardly the unit that was 26th in the nation in scoring offense through three games.
Still, it was a contest at halftime. With Carolina to receive the second-half kickoff, the Heels were only one productive possession away from making it competitive.
"I still thought we would go back out and play a lot better in the second half, and we absolutely played awful, particularly on offense," Bunting said. "They had no energy. That's very, very disappointing. Defensively, as difficult as it was, initially in the first drive I thought the kids played hard, did some good things, to keep that game to 10. That's exactly what we talked about at halftime. It's time for the offense to step up, and we didn't. We had opportunities to make plays and we just didn't come up with them. We had way too many dropped balls, and you can't do that in a game like this."
The kicking game is another area that must be robust for these Tar Heels to be competitive. Deficiencies in the kickoff cover team and in freshman kicker Connor Barth's early tendency to miss to the right have been addressed in practice. But last week, punter David Wooldridge added to the complexity of managing a hundred college males when he was suspended for one game for off-the-field transgressions. Replacement John Choate, kicking in his first college game, followed the Tar Heels' flaccid first possession of the third quarter with a low, wobbly kick that Louisville fielded at midfield and returned to the Carolina 37. To win games this fall, it's incumbent the Tar Heels win the battle of field position; that exchange was not how you accomplish that.
"We did not come up with points in the first half and then we opened with a three-and-out right off the bat in the second half," Bunting said. "We had two negative plays. Then a short punt, fielded on the run, and a run-back. That took a lot of wind out of young players' sails. It was hard to recover after that."
When Eric Shelton slammed over the right side on a simple running play for 37 yards and a score on Louisville's first snap, all the air and emotion fizzled from the Tar Heels and their fans. At 17-0, the momentum and mental edge were all on the side of the Cardinals, a team staking their existence in 2004 to being a Bowl Championship Series spoiler. Conference USA does not get a seat at the post-season bowl feast, and the Cardinals and coach Bobby Petrino have eyes on crashing the party.
"After we shut down Kentucky and Army, people said our defense hadn't stopped anybody," Louisville receiver J.R. Russell said. "Well, they shut down an ACC school today."
Added Shelton: "Our defense shocked me. I didn't know if they could pitch another shutout against a team that has the athletes North Carolina has."
The challenge gets stiffer for Bunting and the Tar Heels. They will be decided underdogs in their next five games, beginning with Saturday's excursion to Tallahassee and a game with perennial juggernaut Florida State.
"I'm not sure how you were raised, I know how I was raised and I'll never put my head down," Bunting said. "Never have, never will."
Moments later in his post-game press conference, Bunting was asked about the chances of the lopsided loss infecting his team's mindset for next week and the rest of the year.
"I would be very surprised if we don't bounce back," he said. "I've got enough senior leadership. There's no reason to sulk and let this game get us down. That was round four. We're coming back for round five. We're playing a great team in Tallahassee, and I hope we show up and play better over a complete game than we did today. We have to."
SQUIB KICKS -
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.
