Extra Points: Hokie High

October 30, 2009 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace

By: UNC Athletic Communications

Oct. 30, 2009

by Lee Pace

There is something about road trips that quickens the pulse and moistens the palm of the college football player and fan. In the case this week for a hundred Tar Heels and a couple thousand Carolina devotees, it was a drive into the blazing colors of the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia. Here the Tar Heels found the neatly-ordered limestone buildings of Virginia Tech's campus, the crystalline autumn air, the aroma of smoked turkey legs wafting over Lane Stadium, and some 66,000 hardy Hokie fans roaring from the bottoms of their considerable throats.

Yet the very nature of the challenge and surroundings can test the brains, resolve, nerves, fortitude and comradeship of a football team like nothing else--and sometimes bring out the very best.

"You know what, I love playing home games, I really do, but there is just something about the road," safety Deunta Williams said late Thursday night. "It's bare bones football. It's you, your teammates, it's everyone together. It brings out the best in you, and it makes you focus and execute. You know if you don't execute, no one else is going to help you. Sometimes the home crowd and the noise can distract you. But with your back to the wall on the road, it really makes you focus a little more."

Road trips evoke an "us-against-the-world" mentality, particularly when the Tar Heels have taken as many stones and arrows as they have the last month. Quarterback T.J. Yates was the target of small hurled objects leaving the field last week after the gut-wrenching loss to Florida State. The Virginia area media showed its customary disdain for the approaching made-for-TV event featuring the vaunted, 14th-ranked Hokies and the moribund Heels, who had yet to win an ACC game. A story in Thursday's Roanoke paper previewed the game with the passage, ".... the Hokies are hacked off and ready to take out their frustration on somebody. Welcome to Blacksburg, Tar Heels," and a columnist named Aaron McFarling added: "It's another opportunity to see the Hokies pound somebody." Tom Robinson in the Virginian-Pilot identified the Tar Heels' quarterback as Tyler Yates and mused that Carolina football over the last decade inhabited a "dank and cobwebbed basement."

All of which simply served to add logs to the Tar Heels' motivational fire.

"Seventeen point underdogs, but we believe we can beat anybody in the country," tight end Zack Pianalto said. "You line anyone up out there and we'll play them. We are not scared of anyone."

Clemson by a touchdown in 1997 .... Clemson by 35 points four years later .... N.C. State by a touchdown in 2005 .... Miami by four points in 2008 .... those are four enormous Tar Heel road victories in recent memory (all of them procured while wearing white pants, white jerseys and Carolina blue headgears, in case you're keeping score). And Thursday night, Butch Davis's squad probably eclipsed all of them in significance by shocking Virginia Tech on sophomore Casey Barth's final-gun field goal. The score was 20-17, and those numbers represented a strong elixir of well-conceived and executed offense, aggressive and nasty defense and a kicking game that avoided the age-old cyanide pill of Virginia Tech games--the blocked punt.

"It sends chills down your spine when the whole team is rushing the field after a big win," Yates said. "This is a hard place to play, and the stakes are big on Thursday night. We executed the game plan absolutely perfectly, the defense played awesome, and it's a great feeling right now."

"We are a very resilient team," added senior defensive end E.J. Wilson. "Character really comes out when things are down. The test is not when things are going good. Character comes out when you are down. Are you going to get off the mat or wallow in your own pity? I think tonight we proved we can get off the mat and not let one loss stop us."

That the Tar Heels could mount a strong defensive showing was no real surprise. The potential has been there all season, but the results have run hot and cold. Coordinator Everett Withers' mantra all week was, "How good are we?" He knew the Tar Heels had piled up some gaudy defensive stats against two Division 1-AA teams and two others, Virginia and East Carolina, which are ranked in the lower quarter in total offense nationwide. But Florida State and QB Christian Ponder were a different story altogether, and holding them to six points through more than a half was significant.

"The first half against Florida State, we were pretty good," Withers said before the game. "But we didn't finish. We could have shown the entire country we were pretty good. We missed that chance. But the great thing is, we get another shot this week."

And they made the most of it. The Tar Heels "built a wall" around the Hokies' nimble-footed quarterback, Tyrod Taylor, and forced him to throw the ball to beat them; Taylor had minus-eight yards rushing. They were essentially sure-handed in tackling and corralling tailback Ryan Williams. They made three sacks and used opportune blitzes in stopping Tech on two fourth-down gambles in the first half. Carolina frequently used a new personnel group by having Wilson, normally an end, shift inside to tackle on passing downs and inserting freshman Donte Paige-Moss at left end to generate more pass rush.

"We wanted to take care of Taylor as far as scrambling, and we did that," Withers said. "We wanted to take care of Williams in the run game, and for the most part, we did that. Part of being a good defense is executing what you intend to do. It's saying, `Okay, here's what we have to stop.' And then you go out and do it."

Now that the Tar Heels are getting healthy on offense--at Tech they had Pianalto for the first full game since the season opener, and center Lowell Dyer returned for one quarter of action after missing six games--they are beginning to move the ball with reasonable consistency. Pianalto and Jonathan Cooper are sledgehammers in the blocking game, and it's not by accident that Carolina's best offense has come in the first half against The Citadel, the first quarter against ECU, the first half against Georgia Southern, and all of the FSU and Virginia Tech games--those being the times when Cooper has been playing left guard and not nursing a bad ankle.

But Virginia Tech has built a defensive machine over two decades, and coordinator Bud Foster engineers a 4-2-5 alignment with two tackles, two corners and seven other players who are sturdy, strong and fast and look like "blurs" to coordinator John Shoop as he studies tape. Last year the Tar Heels were able to find a package of plays off a certain personnel grouping that worked against the Hokies--that was the "bunch set" with three wide receivers set in a cluster. Those plays were important in Yates hitting 11-of-18 passes and lifting the Heels to a 17-3 lead before a broken foot knocked him to the sideline and drenched their momentum, with Tech rallying for a 20-17 win.

This year Shoop and the offensive staff installed a package named "Gobble" in honor of their opponent that featured a new set of shifts and motions by the tailback and flanker Greg Little. Carolina had not used any of those plays yet this fall, so Shoop hoped that their unveiling might put some caution in Foster's scheming and perhaps ratchet down the frequency of Tech blitzes.

The Gobble package first bore fruit in the second quarter when Ryan Houston shifted from tailback to flanker and Little shifted from slot receiver to tailback, then took a hand-off and rolled 23 yards around the right. It produced more big yards in the third quarter when Shaun Draughn moved from tailback to the slot, Little became the tailback, and Yates faked to Little and gave the ball to Draughn on an "around" play that netted 44 yards. Both were key snaps in setting up touchdowns. Yet another variation from Gobble had Erik Highsmith catching a screen pass late in the game for no gain--with it being just an inch from perhaps a touchdown if an offensive linemen could have cleared his block.

All of this could have gone for naught, however, if the Tar Heels didn't respond well to their one moment of truth. Leading 14-10 early in the fourth quarter, Yates made a bad throw on a screen pass that was picked off, setting up a five-yard scoring drive that gave Tech its only lead of the game. The circumstances were eerily reminiscent of last week's pick against Florida State that helped turn the momentum toward the Seminoles. But Yates sloughed off the mistake on the sideline, received a dozen "fugetaboutits" and fanny pats from his teammates and returned on the next possession to engineer an 80-yard field-goal drive. That series included a pair of pinpoint passes to overcome third-and-16, the second one a 19-yarder to Little in the exact seam of Tech's two-deep zone that Yates was looking to exploit.

"After the interception, two things were important," Shoop said. "T.J. did not go into a shell, and I didn't, either. I didn't take the ball out of his hands. We couldn't afford to. Except for that interception, you saw a big-time performance from a quarterback. It was loud and difficult in there, and he kept his poise all night. The kid has grit, I've said that all along."

"The way we fought back was unbelievable," Pianalto added. "The greatest thing was, there was never a single doubt that we were going to score. Right when they hit T.J. and he threw the interception and they scored right away, there was no doubt in anyone's mind the way we had been playing that we would take it right down the field."

Carolina did just that and then added the winning points after Tydreke Powell forced a fumble and Williams recovered deep in Tech territory. By now the crowd sat in stunned silence and, after Barth's winning kick, the Tar Heels stormed the field in a frenzy stoked not only by the win on this night but the remorse of having imploded the week before.

"Playing Virginia Tech is like a 12-round heavyweight prize fight," Davis said. "There are a lot of body blows. It's a physical game. It's a tough game. Sometimes you just have to survive that first and second round and not get knocked out."

The players finished their interviews, showered, dressed and floated on air through a rowdy tunnel of Tar Heel fans outside Lane Stadium. A caravan of four buses then headed south out of Blacksburg, making their way through the night toward Chapel Hill.

"The first hour going home, they were as loud as they had been in the locker room after the game," Davis said Friday afternoon. "Then adrenalin ran out, fatigue set in and they were sound asleep the last two and a half hours. They were physically exhausted."

The Tar Heels returned to Kenan Football Center around 3:30 a.m., then drifted to their respective homes, some of them arriving to find an ESPN rebroadcast of the game having a magnetic pull on them. After all, a great road trip is meant to be savored--over and over again.

Lee Pace has written "Extra Points" since 1990 and is delighted to return from the state of Virginia with a victory. He and the Tar Heel Sports Network broadcast crew field your questions weekly at asktheheels@gmail.com.