University of North Carolina Athletics
Making Things Harder
October 27, 2009 | Football
Oct. 27, 2009
By Lauren Brownlow
Carolina has played Virginia Tech very closely in recent years. Virginia Tech has scored 37 points in the last two games and has beaten the Tar Heels by an average of just five points. The Hokies have 23 of those points on drives that began inside Carolina territory, three times after a turnover, all inside the Carolina 30 (two inside the 15).
Turnovers hurt, and helped turn the momentum against Florida State last Thursday, another team Carolina has had trouble beating. But turnovers weren't the only thing that killed Carolina against Virginia Tech in Kenan Stadium last season.
Carolina took a 17-3 lead with 6:44 left in the third quarter. But it committed five penalties during that final stretch, keeping a Virginia Tech drive alive twice after third-down stops and giving the Hokies an additional 15 yards of field position on its final game-winning field goal drive.
T.J. Yates went out with what would eventually be a small ankle fracture midway through the third quarter. But on Carolina's first play without him, Greg Little had a 50-yard touchdown run to give Carolina that 14-point cushion. The defense had to be feeling good; it had held Virginia Tech to just one field goal and 3.1 yards per play, picking the ball off twice. The offense was not feeling so bad either - it had scored two touchdowns and a field goal, averaging 5.3 yards a play.
But after that touchdown, Virginia Tech would average 6.0 yards per play in its final five drives, scoring two touchdowns and a field goal. Carolina's offense, with backup Mike Paulus forced into duty, ran 17 plays for 37 yards on its final four possessions, averaging 2.2 yards per play and turning it over three times.
It wasn't quite the same situation against Florida State, but there were similarities. "They're both games that we very easily could have won and we let slip out of our hands," senior defensive end E.J. Wilson said. "It's gut-wrenching. It provided a lot of heartache going into the season knowing that we let (Virginia Tech) slip away. It kind of is like the (Florida State) game, but we have a chance to go out here and redeem ourselves for last year and last week."
Carolina was up 24-6 before the Seminoles scored a touchdown, but the Carolina offense was driving into Florida State territory. A Yates interception on the Carolina 2-yard line was followed by a 98-yard FSU touchdown pass on the next play. "It's not that (the 98-yarder) is a back-breaker," Butch Davis said. "You can overcome that. But it's something that you just don't like to see."
While the defensive penalties against Virginia Tech got all the attention in last year's loss, special teams' penalties were just as crucial in both recent losses to the Hokies and in the Florida State loss. Carolina lost 30 yards of starting field position on three drives last Thursday because of special teams' penalties, two holding calls and one 15-yard personal foul. If Carolina had kept its head, that would have been 30 yards of difference in a game where every inch mattered.
Including the last Virginia Tech game, the Tar Heels lost 60 yards of field position one way or the other through special teams' blunders. The Tar Heels had a personal foul and an off-setting unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against the Seminoles, both as the game was starting to swing. Carolina also had two off-setting personal fouls against Virginia Tech, both in the last Blacksburg meeting. Those plays were so huge that one would have given Carolina the ball at its own 50 and the other would have pushed the Hokies back to its 12-yard line. Carolina has four personal fouls in its last two games against Virginia Tech.
Whether it's retaliating or losing a defensive assignment, both involve losing focus and trying to make a play. In those oh-so-close games against Carolina's ACC nemeses, the mistakes have seemed practically contagious as the games get tighter and momentum starts to shift.
"Once you make a mistake, if you linger on it, it's going to compound and it's going to turn into another mistake and another mistake and another mistake that could somehow cost us the game," Wilson said. "I know that's the case with personal fouls - if you're getting into it with a guy, both of you guys are mouthing off back and forth, the ref could not call it, he could keep warning you but he could hit you with that penalty when your team really doesn't need it. We've just got to try to avoid it and once a bad play or something like that happens, just forget about it."
Carolina won't be forgetting about this loss any time soon, and it didn't forget about the Virginia Tech loss last year very easily, either. Yates' injury kept him out for most of the rest of the season and Carolina could have used it as an excuse, not only for the loss but also for the inevitable slide that was to come. Except it didn't.
Last year after the 20-17 loss to the Hokies, Carolina went on a three-game winning streak including comeback wins over Miami and Notre Dame and won five of its next six games. Yates noticed a change in his teammates' approach then and is starting to notice one now. "Of course, everybody was frustrated and angry that we lost, but a lot of the guys on this team used it as motivation," Yates said.
"It was a good thing to see (last Saturday) that there were guys in the film room on our day off. Instead of taking the day off, they were taking that advantage to get in the film room and get a jump-start on our next opponent, especially being such a big opponent in Virginia Tech. It gives you some confidence in your teammates that nobody's giving up. They're using it as motivation to move on to the next week."
Wilson, a leader on the defense and a Virginia native, is sick and tired of hearing about the Hokies when he's back home. He would like to shut those people up but he would also like Carolina to finally get the kind of win it needs, the kind it has come so close to so many times.
"The attitude after (Virginia Tech) was that we missed a golden opportunity to maybe put ourselves in the front-runners for the ACC Championship game last year," Wilson said. "I think the loss Thursday really has motivated some people to go above and beyond the call of duty, to do a lot more than what they've been doing. So I think you're going to see a better effort out of every phase of the game on Thursday."
