University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Red Faced
November 24, 2008 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Nov. 24, 2008
by Lee Pace, Extra Points
The battalion assembled more than four hundred strong, equipped with toboggans, gloves, scarves, pizza, hot chocolate, radios to listen to the Tar Heel basketball game on the west coast and footballs to toss about McCorkle Place. They braved the frigid temperatures through the night Friday, their eyes peeled for any sign of vandals from Raleigh bearing red paint.
The Old Well, Carolina's 111-year-old campus landmark, had been desecrated the night before a Carolina-N.C. State basketball game earlier in the year, and the members of the Carolina Fever student group were committed to protecting its honor on the eve of the annual football grudge match between the Tar Heels and Wolfpack. They had gotten a measure of revenge earlier in the week by leaving the Smith Center after the basketball team's drubbing of Kentucky and slipping into Raleigh in the wee hours and giving State's "free expression tunnel" a coat of light blue paint and appropriate Carolina logos. Anticipating a counter-surge, the students organized the "Old Well Waatch" and provided round-the-clock vigilance Friday night.
One of the event's organizers, Tyler Singleton, a junior from Newland, trudged off to his dorm room at 6:30 Saturday morning with the Old Well clean and secure.
"It was great fun," he said. "We're going to make this an annual tradition."
If only the Tar Heel football team could have protected its turf as well when the main event commenced Saturday at noon.
State hammered the Tar Heels 41-10 on a bright but bracing afternoon and waylaid many of the positives this Carolina team had carefully constructed over two months. Three previous losses had been by a combined eight points, and each could have easily gone the Heels' way. Not this one. This was a proverbial day in the woodshed.
It was the worst loss to the Wolfpack since a 40-6 defeat in Raleigh in 1989 and the worst loss to State in Kenan Stadium since a 48-3 drubbing in 1988. Those were Mack Brown's first two forays into this rivalry, and now Butch Davis opens his tenure at Carolina with an 0-2 start against the Wolfpack.
"Nothing was right, nothing was in rhythm and nobody was in sync," said T.J. Yates, who returned to the starting quarterback job after a two-month injury hiatus. "We have to come out of the gate with some fire and some passion, and we just didn't have it today."
"They just beat us," added senior defensive end E.J. Wilson. "They beat us from start to finish in just about every phase of the game. That's pretty much what it boiled down to. This might have been the worst football game we've played team-wise that I've been a part of here."
Two ominous signs presented themselves before the game was six minutes old.
Yates' first pass, intended for Cooter Arnold slanting across the middle, was thrown ahead and high of its target. Yates would never get into a rhythm and labored under a thick coat of rust acquired over his convalescence. Some passes sailed, others hit the turf. He was under a furious pass rush all day. It was sad to hear a chorus of boos reigning down on a classy kid like Yates late in the third quarter after the Heels were stuffed on yet another three-and-out possession, but that's the nature of the big-time athletic beast today.
And after gains of 20 and then four yards to start the game, tailback Shaun Draughn was stripped of the football on a tackle by State's Jimmaul Simmons. The Tar Heel defense fended off that "sudden change" threat, but on the Heels' very next snap, a pack of four State defenders swarmed Draughn and peeled the ball from his gut. That aggressive mantra defined the proceedings and gave State a 6-0 advantage in turnovers. Another strip came when State sky-kicked to Carolina's wedge blockers on a third-quarter kick-off, and Richard Quinn attempted a return and the ball was promptly shucked from his arms. State scored the next play and the avalanche was rolling in all its glory.
"They came into Kenan Stadium today on a mission to try to take us out of everything possible," Yates said. "They were aggressive and flew to the ball."
"There will never be a football game ever played that you can lose a turnover ratio as dramatically as we did and still give yourselves a chance to win," Davis added.
Is the Wolfpack 31 points better than the Tar Heels? Of course not. Games get out of hand at times when the momentum steamrolls in one team's favor. A similar scenario unfolded Saturday night in College Park, where a Maryland team that clipped the Tar Heels by two points a week ago was pounded 37-3 by Florida State. Maryland lost two fumbles and two interceptions and FSU didn't commit a turnover.
A 4-0 turnover margin in College Park equaled a 34-point difference.
A 6-0 turnover margin in Chapel Hill equated with a 31-point differential.
Still, the Tar Heels' performance put a magnifying glass on some important issues.
Carolina's decade-long dormant running game has sprung to life behind the emergence of Draughn and a slimmed-down Ryan Houston over the last six weeks, but the passing game has become a feeble version of its old high-octane self. Defenses are concentrating on Hakeem Nicks since the season-ending injury to Brandon Tate in early October, and a combination of a wayward throw on one snap then a dropped ball on the next are poisoning the Heels' efforts to get other receivers involved. The Heels are 4-for-22 in third-down conversions against Maryland and State and are completing less than half of their passes over two games.
Davis and offensive coordinator John Shoop took heat from some quarters for not giving Yates an opportunity against Maryland as Sexton was clearly struggling. Then they went with Yates against State based on the "body of work" he had accumulated as the full-time starter in 2007 and the first two and a half games this year. Now they are predictably in the crosshairs of those who felt Sexton should have taken over for Yates earlier than the fourth-quarter mop-up call he got Saturday. Clearly it's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario.
"You can't look in the rearview mirror," Davis said Saturday. "How do you really know? Based on what they have done, we feel that both of those guys are pretty good quarterbacks. They have both had some pretty good success."
He followed that observation Sunday with the benefit of 24 hours of tape study and conversations with Shoop and Yates: "There were some mechanics breakdowns in his throwing motion that definitely were not evident through the course of the week in practice when the speed and the tempo were clearly not the same. But they are things T.J. can work on."
And there's the defense. Wolfpack quarterback Russell Wilson is a considerable force--he's fast, athletic, confident, savvy and accurate--and he deservers proper homage for his performance. Throwing the ball, he was 17-of-28 for 279 yards with no interceptions. Running the ball, he gained 57 yards on 11 carries. But Wilson and the State offense identified and exploited the Heels' lack of a pair of lockdown cornerbacks and the fact that one defensive end is limited in his pass-rushing agility (Wilson) and the others are still green around the gills (Robert Quinn, Michael McAdoo and Quinton Coples). The Tar Heels have protected their secondary for the most part this season by picking and choosing their blitzes carefully; several times they blitzed Saturday and paid for it dearly.
Davis applauded the defense's stout efforts early in the game to ward off State threats gifted by the two fumbles. And he acknowledged the weight of the turnovers as the day wore can surely zap a defense's spirit. But he also noted the defense contributed to some of the success Wilson and the Wolfpack enjoyed (466 total yards).
On occasion a player would try to do too much: "A guy abandons the scheme and thinks for any number of reasons that, `I'm going to make play to get us out of this,' and he winds up being the culprit and gives up the big play," Davis said.
Others let Wilson out of the pocket. Others gave up their pass rush lanes. Secondary players were caught leaning in the wrong direction.
"As a coaching staff, what we have to do is make sense to our players as to why those things happened," Davis said.
The loss was indeed a reality check for those wishing and hoping and projecting that this team was better than it really is. A berth in the ACC title game? A stretch perhaps. Winning it and going to the Orange Bowl? A major stretch (though it was certainly fun toying with the thought). Meanwhile, State has rebounded from early season injury problems and now is playing efficiently and confidently and has ripped off wins over East Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest and the Tar Heels, giving the Pack the unofficial "state title" that Mack Brown used to talk about in the mid-1990s.
"Our kids are smart enough to realize that in the games we've won, there's been a formula for those games," Davis said. "We haven't turned the ball over, we haven't given up big plays, we've been very efficient as far as penalties are concerned, and we have run the ball effectively. We minimized the ways in which other teams can beat us."
"It's gut-check time," Yates added. "How important is it to us individually as players and a team? How bad do we want to win?"
Its pride, its reputation and its momentum now rubbed with the salt of the N.C. State game, the Tar Heels go back to work. At least the issue of the red paint was a non-starter. But then you have to remember that Duke will have cans of royal blue paint ready in the event the Blue Devils can reclaim the Victory Bell early Saturday evening.
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace is in his 19th year of chronicling Carolina football through "Extra Points." He'll answer questions about the Tar Heels weekly throughout the season through his "Extra Points Mailbag" and on the pregame show for the Tar Heel Sports Network. Email him at leepace@nc.rr.com and include your name and hometown. No recruiting questions, please.
Players Mentioned
