University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Looking For Rebirth
October 4, 2006 | Football
Oct. 4, 2006
by Lee Pace, Extra Points
"Every time you win, you're reborn. Every time you lose, you die a little."
--Coach George Allen
The one-hour flight from Greenville-Spartanburg to Raleigh-Durham a week ago Saturday left just enough time for one of the NFL Films documentaries that John Bunting is always showing his Tar Heel football teams. This one, Three Cheers for the Redskins, chronicled the rebuilding efforts of Allen in the nation's capital in the early 1970s. It opened and closed with the Hall of Fame coach talking of the misery of losing.
Little did Bunting know when he scheduled the film for the team's entertainment on its return flight from Clemson how apropos it would be. The Tar Heels had been destroyed by the Tigers, 52-7. The Heels didn't just die a little that day.
They died a lot.
"There comes a time when you've just got to say, `No more,'" Bunting says, "when you refuse to lose. Our team in 2001 did that. They lost three in a row to open the year and said, `No more. We're not taking it any longer.'
"That's what I think this football team is ready to do."
Two-thirds of the Tar Heels' 2006 football season remains. There are trips to two traditional college hotbeds, Miami and Notre Dame, in the offing, not to mention a visit to that two-decade house of horrors in Charlottesville, Va. There are four home games on the schedule, two of them against Big Four rivals Wake Forest and NC State.
"There's a lot of football left to play," senior tackle Brian Chacos says. "Eight games. A lot of our goals are still out there. It's a new week, a new game."
"You can't change the past," offensive coordinator Frank Cignetti says. "But you can change the future. That's what we intend to do."
"We're excited to get back out there," senior defensive tackle Shelton Bynum adds.
With an off-week last week, the Tar Heels, 1-3, withdrew into the cocoon of Kenan Football Center for a lot of soul-searching, chalk-talks, live combat and regrouping. The rest of the season begins at Noon Saturday in Miami.
"We're hungry," says center Scott Lenahan. "We're hungry to show people how good this team really is. Our fans, we definitely need to show them better than what we have been with our performance. We've not shown how good this team really is and can be."
Adds Bunting: "There's a lot of spirit in this group. You have a chance to get better whenever you have cooperation and a lot of spirit."
The Tar Heels have held five practice sessions since the carnage at Clemson. Bunting and his staff organized the workouts last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in a training-camp mode with emphasis on live contact and fundamentals. The staff went recruiting on Friday, gave the players the weekend off and reassembled Monday evening to begin their typical game-week focus on the coming opponent.
There are no eye-popping personnel adjustments. Ben Lemming became the first Tar Heel offensive lineman to have played this year beyond the five starters when he entered the Clemson game in relief of Garrett Reynolds. Lemming, who was sidelined with an illness early in the year, has recovered and has alternated with Reynolds as the No. 1 right tackle this week. Sophomore linebacker Chase Rice and freshman linebacker Wesley Flagg are getting more reps with the first team in certain situations. Defensive coordinator Marvin Sanders is going to move upstairs to the press box for the Miami game with linebackers coach Tommy Thigpen moving to the sideline. David Wooldridge is back as the No. 1 punter after sitting the Furman game out, then returning to average 45 yards on six kicks at Clemson.
Beyond those tweakings, the focus is on playing better football.
"What I saw at Clemson was a breakdown of the integrity of the entire defense," Bunting says of a unit that allowed 504 yards of offense. "As things snowballed, they got worse until midway in the third quarter when Clemson called the dogs off.
"It's a matter of execution. It's an execution thing. We have good enough players to help us win football games. Some people define `talent' as heights and weights and 40 times and vertical jumps. Those things help. But `talent' to me is playing hard and tough and smart, understanding your job and how it fits with everyone else on the team. We have that kind of talent. It's time to show it."
Sanders says the onus is on him and the defensive coaching staff to get the players in better position to make plays. He believes the problems are fixable.
"That's the exciting thing, they are correctable mistakes," he says. "If a guy makes a play over you or through you because he's better, you deal with that. What we didn't do was put ourselves in position to make a play. We have the ability."
Cornerback Jacoby Watkins noted the passion with which the Tar Heels went after each other during bye-week practices.
"It's crazy how we go after each other like that with that intensity but we can't seem to do that against Clemson," Watkins says. "We know exactly what we did wrong. It's not like they were so much better than us athletically. They weren't faster than us, stronger than us. We were just mentally messing up. That's something that's plagued the defense all year except maybe the Virginia Tech game.
"We can play well, we know we can. We just have to eliminate the mental mistakes."
Neither the offense nor the defense helped the other side of the ball at all against Clemson. The offense had only three first downs in the first half and under 12 minutes of possession time; it never gave the defense the chance to catch its breath on a hot, steamy afternoon. The defense yielded touchdowns on five of the Tigers' six first-half possessions; it buried the offense in a deeper hole with every tick of the clock.
"It's a team game, and we didn't do our part," Cignetti says. "That was very disappointing. We didn't have enough at-bats. We didn't make first downs and keep the chains moving. We never got anything going."
Cignetti praised the poise and composure of freshman QB Cam Sexton in his second starting assignment and lamented dropped passes in the first quarter - one on a difficult throw to snare and one on an easy pass to catch.
"When you have opportunities to make plays in the passing game, you have got to convert," he says. "We came up short."
Cignetti says most games in his four-plus years as an offensive coordinator in college (four at Fresno State, this one at Carolina) have been about what his offense did or did not do. This particular game, however, in which Carolina managed only 150 yards offense, was as much about the opponent as the Tar Heels themselves.
"Virginia Tech was about us, I firmly believe that," he said of Carolina's 35-10 loss Sept. 11. "I think Georgia Tech showed there are weaknesses in that defense. Clemson, in my estimation, is a better football team and defense than Virginia Tech. Our game Saturday had a lot to do with what Clemson was. Few times in the last five years have I walked off field and said, `They had a lot to do with it.' This was one of those times. They had a lot to do with our offensive shortcomings. Clemson is that good."
Bunting and the Tar Heels hope history will repeat itself when they return to the field following a bye week. They were hammered at Utah in 2004 and responded with a win over Miami after an open week. They were battered by Louisville in 2005, took a week off and then beat Virginia.
"We've used the bye week in the past to really get focused again and understand we can't break down like this," Bynum says. "We don't like losing like this. We used the bye week to make sure a loss like that never happens again."
As George Allen and the Tar Heels know, losing and dying have much in common. Allen was not a frequent loser with the Redskins. Now it's up to the Tar Heels to steel themselves around a sage piece of wisdom.
Send your questions about Tar Heel football to Lee Pace at leepace@nc.rr.com. Please include your first and last names and hometown. Individual replies are not possible because of volume of mail received, and names of recruiting prospects and commitments cannot be published on a school-sponsored site until the national signing day in February . The Q&A column will appear each Friday during the season.
