University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Dazed And Confused
September 2, 2006 | Football
Sept. 2, 2006
By Adam Lucas
Larry Edwards looked dazed.
He was in the postgame interview room, waving his hand in front of his face. You know the gesture--it's what you do when you're trying to snap someone out of a daze. Back and forth, eyes not blinking, just the same blank look.
He was trying to describe what the abundance of Rutgers presnap motion had done to the Carolina defense.
"It's meant to confuse you," he said. "It's meant to get your focus away from where it's supposed to be. It's like somebody waving their hand in front of your face while you're looking at somebody else. It's going to catch your attention, and it can get you on the wrong keys. And that's what it did to us."
Edwards is a senior, so he didn't have to be prompted with questions after Carolina's 21-16 season opening loss to Rutgers. He knew what was being said up and down Stadium Drive, knew what fans were talking about at their tailgates. Heck, he didn't have to hear it from the fans. He'd already heard it from John Bunting in the head coach's extremely intense postgame locker room address to his team--an address that zeroed in squarely on the defense.
So he knew. He knew the defense had been getting rave reviews in training camp. He was one who had been providing the rave reviews. It was Edwards who coined "The New Blue," because he thought this year's team was different.
You know how you felt leaving Kenan Saturday afternoon around 7:15? How you felt you'd somehow been cheated, how you had heard all the glowing reports about an even better defense--some right here on this website--and wondered exactly where those players spent their Saturday afternoon?
Now imagine how Edwards felt. He hadn't just heard second-hand reports. He'd lived it. More importantly, he'd believed it.
And now...this? This?
"Our defense was supposed to be the strong point of this team," he said. "We're supposed to be the guys who, no matter what situation we're in, we get us out of it. And today we didn't step up at all. Not at all."
That's what 217 rushing yards, 8-of-13 third down converted, and a 7-minute disadvantage in time of possession will do to a team. The only Rutgers 3-and-out came late in the fourth quarter, by which time the Tar Heel defense had snapped out of whatever funk possessed them through the first three quarters.
Since training camp opened in early August, this has been a group that flew around the practice field, creating turnovers, wreaking havoc. Sure, it's easy to say that was because they were going against a struggling Carolina offense, but they weren't just getting giveaways. They were taking the ball away, making plays.
That didn't happen Saturday.
"Their shifting was making us rethink what we had to do," tackle Shelton Bynum said. "It held us down for a second. We were thinking, `Where do I line up? Who has what? Where do I go?' We had to redo a lot of presnap reads."
Bynum hit on the perfect description of the Carolina defense--they were one second behind. Whether it was the Rutgers presnap motion, a quality Scarlet Knights running game, or a defensive breakdown (or the most likely culprit, a combination of all three), it was true for much of the first three quarters.
Within the span of a couple minutes, Bunting used the words "disgrace," "disappointment," and "disgusts" to describe his team's defensive effort. But he also said, "The team that steamrolled us in the second half last year (Virginia Tech) is coming to town. So we're going to see what our defense is all about this week."
Here's the thing: there's no question the defense will be better next week. Based on the history of Bunting's teams, which have continuously played much better with their backs against the wall, you'd be foolish not to believe it.
But that leaves a nagging question, the same one that Edwards was pondering as he sat slumped in his chair wearing two eye black strips, one that read "Faith" and one that read "Family." Why don't the Tar Heels throw the first punch? Why do they have to be backed into a corner before they respond?
"We played so far below our potential it's ridiculous," he said. "We let them dictate the pace of the game."
He considered this for just a beat, and it seemed to infuriate him even more.
"That's something we work on every day. We work on dictating the pace of every game and every situation.
"We played so far below our potential it was mind-boggling."
He rubbed his face in his hands. At that moment, he wasn't the New Blue. He just looked, well, blue.
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.
