University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Enough is Enough
October 22, 2005 | Football
Oct. 22, 2005
By Adam Lucas
Trimane Goddard probably had no idea that he was answering the question everyone will be asking in the days to come.
Goddard, a sophomore safety, was simply trying to explain how he worked his way into position to tip a Marques Hagans pass on the most important play of the game, a tip that eventually ended up in the arms of Cedrick Holt for a game-changing interception late in the fourth quarter.
"I had the middle deep third of the field, but there was a crosser," Goddard said. "I had to jump the crosser on the bootleg. I saw the quarterback scrambling but I didn't want to come all the way up because I had a responsibility. So I came inbetween and as that happened he threw the ball. It hit me in the hands and Cedrick came up with the interception."
You don't necessarily have to understand all the football lingo in the above paragraph--the middle deep third, the crosser, the bootleg, the jumping the crosser--to understand the point. Here's the bottom line: Goddard had an assignment. He stayed with it. Good things happened.
That's the answer to how the Carolina defense was able to turn a 69-point debacle in the last outing against Louisville into a zero-touchdown performance against Virginia. For whatever reason, assignments were blown against the Cardinals two weeks ago. That didn't happen against Virginia.
This was a Cavalier team ranked in the top half of the country in scoring offense, a team that had scored less than 26 points in a game only once this season.
On Saturday, however, for the first time since 2001, Virginia had trouble gaining yards against Carolina. The last three games in this series had been hideous, with an average Tar Heel margin of defeat of 22.3 points. But the sheer numbers didn't tell the full story. What was more disheartening about the rivalry was the way Virginia pushed Carolina around in the trenches. They were bigger, stronger, tougher. They swaggered in with a reputation for a physical offensive line and proceeded to blow the Heels off the ball.
With that in mind, Carolina coaches screened several key plays from the history of the series for the entire team this week. The full squad gathered in the Kenan Football Center and watched a parade of Wahoo tailbacks rush for 299 yards on 48 carries last season. They watched Virginia go for it on 4th and 2 deep in their own territory and make it last season. They watched Alvin Pearman gather 94 yards on just 13 carries in 2003. They watched a 37-point Cavalier explosion in 2002.
They didn't like it.
"This is 2005," Barrington Edwards said. "Whatever happened back in the day, we don't have any control over that. We used it as a little motivation. Enough is enough. They've beaten us up for a while. They had a bully mentality. We wanted to take care of the bully today. That was our attitude."
Both Goddard and Edwards provided an underappreciated element that allowed the Tar Heels to vanquish this particular bully: depth. For too long, the Carolina first string has been the only option. That began to change in training camp this year. Goddard and Mahlon Carey waged a month-long war for the strong safety position. The senior won it before the season opener, but Goddard kept his mouth shut, played his nickel back position, and eventually earned back the starting role this week.
Meanwhile, on offense, Edwards might have allowed himself to sulk when Ronnie McGill came back from his torn chest muscle. The LSU transfer knew his carries would decrease, and that premonition proved correct against Louisville when McGill was used almost exclusively in the red zone.
But Edwards made a simple decision: if his carries were going to come early, he was going to make them count. They look simple on the stat sheet: a 6-yard run on a draw play. A 3-yard run up the middle. An 8-yard burst to the left followed by a 13-yard sprint over the middle.
It wasn't necessarily the yardage that was important with those carries, it was the attitude. The Carolina offensive line was opening holes and Edwards was hitting them harder than he's hit them all year. The bully was being served notice.
"I knew Virginia was coming in here with high hopes," Edwards said. "So either I was going to let them knock me out or I was going to do the knocking out."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and 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 Going Home Again, click here.
