Extra Points: Back To The U

October 25, 2010 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace

By: UNC Athletic Communications

Oct. 25, 2010

by Lee Pace

The clock was running down Saturday evening to 24, 23, 22 minutes to kickoff, and the energy crackled on the playing field at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens. Sebastian the Ibis pranced around the Miami bench area while fans of "The U" cried out their "Blow Hurricanes" cheer.

The site of the Hurricanes' finest moments lies 15 miles south in Little Havana--the Orange Bowl and its iconic palm trees swaying in the east end zone are now nothing more than rubble following their 2008 demolition. But the vestiges of that tradition are marked on the rim of the upper deck in the Hurricanes' new home venue: National titles 1983, '87, '89, '91 and 2001.

"Yeah, we had some fun," Pete Garcia is saying, sitting on the bench on the Tar Heel sideline. "We won a lot of football games. But I have to say this. I know Butch Davis and where he's been and I know what he's done coaching-wise, and I think is his best coaching job ever. To lose this many great players and have this many distractions and rattle off four wins in a row, gosh, that's amazing to me."

Garcia worked with and under the Tar Heels' head coach for six years at Miami and four in Cleveland in the NFL from 1995-2004 and is now athletic director at Florida International University in Miami. Davis and his coaching staff lured enough talent to Coral Cables from 1995-2000 for 28 to land first-round NFL designations and for succeeding head coach Larry Coker to win the 2001 national title and come within a whisker of repeating in 2002. Remarkably, they did so coming out of the dank and dungy recesses of a program raft with financial-aid, drug-testing and assault-and-battery misdeeds.

"Fortunately for North Carolina, Butch has had a lot of training at dealing with tough times," Garcia says. "He took Miami out of probation and dealt with unbelievable tragedies there with some of our players. Some way, some how, he knows how to keep his team focused. Rock-solid stability--that's Butch. His players see it, his assistant coaches see it."

High above the field in one of the private viewing suites, a Miami graduate with a long history of administrative and alumni service watches with mixed emotions. Betty Amos will pull for Miami but hopes that Davis's team plays well.

"I am very worried about this game," says Amos, a member of the UM Board of Trustees since the mid-1990s and currently chair of the Audit and Compliance Committee. "I always say UM is my alma mater and I want us to win, but I want Butch's team to do well against us. It has amazed me that this North Carolina team has continued to win. Wow--I'm sure with the players they've lost and all the distractions, I'm sure most people thought they would be lucky to have won one game by this time. It just shows Butch's ability as a leader and how he has the utmost confidence of the young men still in the program."

It turns out that Amos and some 43,000 Miami fans had little to worry about. Take Miami, a good team molded in the Sunshine State tradition of jets-in-cleats, and oppose it against Carolina, a team hanging by a thread with a roster decimated by suspensions and injuries, and the result was an avalanche that buried the Heels by a 33-10 margin. Veterans Quan Sturdivant, Zack Pianalto, Greg Elleby and LaCount Fantroy have recently fallen to injury, and on Saturday Da'Norris Searcy, Anthony Elzy, Mywan Jackson and Ryan Taylor hobbled or limped off the field, not to return. The Hurricanes ran the ball with ease (five yards a clip) and QB Jacory Harris picked apart a secondary that, with suspensions and injuries, is down to third- and fourth-team cornerbacks.

"It's a challenge," Davis says. "As I told the players in the locker room, you're always one injury away from someone having to go into a ballgame and step up."

"It's no secret we're missing key components in our defense," safety Deunta Williams adds. "The whole world knows that. They're going to go after the freshmen. Our young guys have to understand they're `freaks' themselves [locker room slang saluting a player's freakish athleticism]. They can go out there and play. The quicker they understand that, the sooner they can go out there and make plays just like the older guys."

Yet much of the news in 2010 has been off the field, and Davis's friends and former colleagues and the players who won so many games wearing green and orange have watched from a distance with a measure of concern. The ironies were rich this weekend. The Tar Heels visited the very place where Davis established his reputation as a no-nonsense, by-the-books coach. And it was just a short drive away, amid the sherbet-colored buildings and porthole shaped windows of South Beach, that two Tar Heel players coveted by agents for their future NFL worth traveled last spring, violating NCAA rules and launching the dominos that have rocked the world of Tar Heel football.

"I believe the agent issue is today what steroids are to major league baseball," Garcia says. "It's happening all over. Unfortunately, there are no repercussions for the agents. You've got it going on all over the country. This is not just a North Carolina problem. The NCAA is trying to get a handle on it. It's really a challenge to everyone in the business. It's a challenge to the NCAA to maintain the integrity of the game. We all have our hands full."

Mistakes obviously have been made around the Tar Heel program, perhaps most of them errors of omission by the adults that might have prevented errors of commission by the kids. But it's comforting to know for those who care about the reputation of the University as a whole that there are legions of Butch-backers in and around Miami that will give you chapter-and-verse about his skills shepherding the UM program.

* From Milton Wallace, a 1950s undergrad and law school graduate of UM and today a member of the President's Council:

"Butch was 100 percent the solution, not the problem. I've never known a more qualified coach who's done a better job with a team, and Miami's mistake was not doing everything in the world to get him back [after he left the Cleveland Browns of the NFL]."

* From Andre King, who played wide receiver for the Hurricanes and Browns and is now athletic director at Loganville Christian Academy outside of Atlanta:

"To a man, guys would run through a brick wall if Butch said, `Hey, this is what we're going to do to be successful in life, on the field, in the classroom.' We trusted him. We did not want to let him down in any way. During our time you never saw a whole lot of guys getting in trouble. He poured into us the idea of, `Make sure you make good choices. Don't be selfish. Don't think about yourself first, think about the other 84 guys in the room you're going to let down.'"

* From Ken Dorsey, a Hurricane quarterback now playing for the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL:

"You came to school with Coach Davis to follow the rules. If you break the rules, he'll be the first one to bench you. The year before I got there, they are playing UCLA, the No. 1 team in the country, and he benches a bunch of starters because they broke the rules. [Actually UCLA was ranked No. 3 in the AP poll in late 1998 and Davis benched two starters for missing study hall; Miami won, 49-45.] He's more `by the book' than anyone I know. He believes in doing things the right way. It's unfortunate North Carolina is in the situation they're in. If guys will just listen to Coach Davis and do what he's asking them to do, the sky's the limit with that program."

* From David Wyman, who joined the academics services staff at Miami in 1995, two months after Davis took over the football program, and today is associate athletic director for academic services:

"Coach Davis certainly instilled discipline in the football program. More importantly, he created a culture of, `Do the right things, and the right things will happen.' If you didn't, you didn't play for the most part. I give him a lot of credit for doing that at a time you could look the other way because of depth issues. He did sit guys out. We needed that at that time. I give him a lot of credit for that."

* From David Scott, who worked with Davis for a decade in recruiting and administrative roles and now is general manager and race director for the ING Miami Marathon:

"I'm not sure everyone understands what you have in Butch Davis and the principles he stands for. Everyone needs to take a big, deep sigh and say, `Okay, this happened, we will put structures in place that will correct it, that will hopefully prevent it from happening again.' You do that realizing that you are dealing with human beings who make poor choices from time to time, and there are barracudas and sharks out there trying to take advantage of them."

* And more from Betty Amos:

"Athletic compliance is the part that scares me most. It only takes one person to really damage the program and damage young lives, which is the worst part of it. I'm sure Butch is more dismayed than anyone that these problems have occurred on his watch. He is a strong believer in doing things the right way. And I know that, as he did here, he will also do everything humanly possible to eliminate those problems."

There is much indeed on the plate today of Butch Davis--from improving the processes and procedures of his program away from the field to finding enough bodies to suit up on the field.

1979 Carolina graduate Lee Pace (leepace7@gmail.com) is in his 21st year writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner. Look for his missives each Monday during the season. Pace and the broadcast crew of the Tar Heel Sports Network answer questions from fans on the pre-game show; submit them to asktheheels@gmail.com.