University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Openers Of Distinction
August 30, 2010 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Aug. 30, 2010
by Lee Pace
The first three-quarters of Carolina's century-plus of football history were marked by two distinct eras of season-openers. Through two decades in the 1920s and '30s, the Tar Heels christened their season 17 times against Wake Forest, their rival located at the time in the small town in northern Wake County. Then for two decades in the 1950s and '60s, Carolina and N.C. State were first on the schedule 15 times.
The rest of the years have been a hodge-podge of games against smaller schools willing to come to Chapel Hill on a one-shot basis, with no requirement of a return game, sprinkled with the occasional marquee collision against a heady opponent. Quite frequently, games of the latter nature have provided a springboard, jump-start and momentum boost toward an excellent year.
If you're marinating in the news of the last month, following is a diversion down memory lane--five opening wins against high-profile opponents that staked the Heels to memorable autumns.
The third edition of the vaunted "Justice Era" Tar Heels had a full year to stew over their 34-0 whipping at the hands of the Texas Longhorns from early in the 1947 season. Though the Longhorns of coach Blair Cherry whipped LSU 33-0 in their 1948 opener and were judged to be stronger than the team that went 10-1 and whipped Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, Tar Heel coach Carl Snavely was confident his team, led by the junior tailback-punting sensation Charlie Justice, would return the favor to the Longhorns. In fact, at the team's Friday evening meeting before the Texas game, instead of parsing two hours worth of Xs-and-Os and game plan notes, Snavely looked around the room and had one thing to say.
"I think tomorrow we're going to beat Texas as bad as they beat us last year," Snavely said matter-of-factly. "I'll be very disappointed if we don't."
With that, he put on his hat and coat, gathered his papers and left the room.
"We literally exploded on them the next day," says Joe Neikirk, a center on that team.
"We were a bit of an older team that year," adds end and place-kicker Bob Cox. "We didn't need a lot of rah-rah. We had a quiet confidence."
Carolina won the toss and Snavely went against the grain of thinking at the time of a team always choosing to receive if it won toss. Instead, he elected to kick. Tar Heel Mike Rubish, feeling he could get more elevation on his kick-offs with a bare foot, nailed one deep and the Longhorns were stuffed three-and-out on their first possession. Snavely called for a fake reverse on the ensuing punt, with Justice fielding the ball at the Carolina 21, rolling one way and faking a handoff to Johnny Clements. Justice then motored 38 yards to the Texas 41.
It took the Tar Heels only three plays to score, with Justice hitting Art Weiner on a 20-yard pass with 3:30 elapsed. Justice returned to the sideline, where he told Snavely, "Relax, Coach, this one won't be a problem."
The Tar Heels burst to a 21-0 lead 12 minutes into the game and never looked back, posting a 34-7 win in front of an overflow crowd of some 43,500 fans in Kenan Stadium. Carolina's depth proved crucial in the decision. Following the 1947 losses to Texas and then Wake Forest the following week, Snavely went to what was an innovative practice at the time--two-platooning, with 11 players on offense and 11 on defense. The Tar Heel defense was excellent, stopping Texas (which had a fullback named Tom Landry on its starting roster) with only 38 yards rushing. Forced into throwing to try to catch up, Texas logged 183 yards passing on 13-of-33 attempts and three interceptions. The Tar Heel victory led to a 9-1-1 season and Sugar Bowl appearance against Oklahoma.
Bill Dooley posted records of 2-8, 3-7 and 5-5 during his first three seasons from 1967-69, and by the fourth year his program had matured in talent and mental rigor that it was ready to challenge the upper echelon of the old eight-team ACC. The Tar Heels were picked No. 1 in the league in the pre-season media tour, a news item not lost on the players.
"That has given us a lift," senior tailback Don McCauley said. "It's provided us something to live up to and to look forward to."
The opening foe was hardly the ilk of Notre Dame, Penn State or Alabama, but Kentucky was nonetheless a card-carrying member of the SEC and returned 19 of 22 starters. Carolina had opened with N.C. State for 15 of the previous 20 seasons and had lost all three under Dooley. The Wolfpack game came second on the schedule in 1970, leaving the Tar Heels with a challenging, yet very winnable game, against the Wildcats. (The opener fell, incidentally, one day after prep basketball star Tom McMillen backed off his commitment to Dean Smith and instead enrolled at Maryland.)
John Bunting was a junior linebacker and defensive signal-caller that year and remembers pre-game warm-ups. He looked over and saw an assistant coach from Kentucky saunter over to Tar Heel assistant Bobby Collins.
"Bobby, you got any football players over here?" the coach asked.
Collins paused a minute, then answered: "What we have, is a well-oiled machine."
Bunting smiles years later, recalling the moment.
"That fired me up," he says. "We weren't sure exactly how good we were. We thought we were pretty good, but we hadn't proven it yet. But to hear Coach Collins say that out loud, I was ready to knock someone's head off."
The Tar Heels broke open a 10-10 halftime knot and dominated the second half en route to a 20-10 win. McCauley gained 160 yards on 28 carries and caught a 48-yard pass from Paul Miller for a touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter. Miller, who beat out John Swofford and Mike Mansfield for the starting job in training camp, threw nine times for six completions, 141 yards and also had a 41-yard completion to Lewis Jolley for a score. Ken Craven added a pair of field goals.
The next week the Tar Heels thumped N.C. State 19-0, giving Dooley his first win in four tries against the Wolfpack. Carolina went on to post an 8-4 record and land a Peach Bowl berth against Arizona State.
"I received a lot of pleasure watching this big win," UNC athletic director Homer Rice said. "I was really sweating it out. But after the game, I knew Bill Dooley's team was for real."
One of the most difficult seasons ever endured at Carolina came in 1978, Dick Crum's first year after replacing Dooley, who left to become football coach and athletic director at Virginia Tech. Dooley and Crum were both excellent coaches, but their personalities, styles and backgrounds were polar opposites. The Tar Heels were loaded with talent in 1978, but the difficulties in the transition as well as an ill-fated switch to the veer offense (shelved five games into the year) caused the Heels to sputter to a 5-6 record in Crum's first year. The nadir of the season was a 28-17 loss at Richmond.
One year later, there were still plenty of quality players on hand, and Crum's staff had recruited well in its first year of operation. But the transition was over and the players had adjusted to Crum's style and methods of running a football program.
"Dick has had that one year it takes to get it back on track," South Carolina coach Jim Carlen said leading up to the opener in Chapel Hill.
Crum made the mistake of having his team report to camp five weeks prior to the opener in 1978 (a four-point win over East Carolina). "That was too much," Crum said. "After a while, your mental edge wears thin."
He set the opening of fall camp three and a half weeks prior to the 1979 opener and gave his team off the weekend before the first game. Though the Tar Heels returned only six starters from the year before, they had plenty of good players coming up through the ranks. Junior Amos Lawrence was joined at tailback by freshman Kelvin Bryant, and Matt Kupec was the No. 1 quarterback after a revolving door scenario the year before. "Matt is our No. 1 man," Crum said. "He's a much more proficient player than at any time last year."
The Tar Heels annihilated the Gamecocks from the opening kickoff. Lawrence gained 137 yards on 25 carries and Kupec hit nine of 14 passes for 94 yards and served, in Carlen's view from the opposing bench, as "a coach on the field." The Gamecocks didn't get past midfield the first half and were never inside the Tar Heel 25 yard-line. They were hounded in the field position battle by kicks like one of 60 yards from Carolina's Steve Streater.
"Most of the time, you're pretty nervous before the first game," Kupec said. "This one was different. Everyone on the team was so confident. We were ready to play this game."
The resounding victory was just the shot of juice the program needed. Two weeks later, the Tar Heels dominated Pitt 17-7 in Kenan Stadium and were on their way to an 8-3-1 season, capped by a memorable 17-15 win over Michigan in the Gator Bowl.
The Tar Heels' 1993 season was originally set to launch with a home game against Ohio University of the Mid-America Conference. But shortly after the New Year, athletic director John Swofford and coach Mack Brown arranged for the Heels to play USC in late August in the Disneyland Pigskin Classic.
Carolina was coming off a 9-3 season while the Trojans were heralding the return of coach John Robinson following a nine-year hiatus to the NFL. Still, the Tar Heels got little regard when they traveled west for the nationally televised game on Sunday night. The Trojans were 8.5 point favorites, and one Los Angeles newspaper over the weekend wondered what similarities there were between Carolina's football and basketball teams, the latter just coming off its 1993 NCAA title: "They both have five good players."
"We're tired of all that stuff," tailback Curtis Johnson sniffed.
The Tar Heels went out and hammered the Trojans 31-9, leaving Traveler, their handsome, white Arabian horse mascot, looking more like a dusty old plow mule. Though Carolina had employed a modest amount of option the previous season, they turned senior QB Jason Stanicek loose with the option and he and the tailback tandem of Curtis and Leon Johnson had USC totally confused, gaining 312 yards on the ground and nailing a 41-yard pass set up by the option.
"Jason's one of the best quarterbacks in the nation," Curtis said. "We've spent all spring and all pre-season working on our timing. Tonight it worked great."
It was the Tar Heels' second straight national TV win over a ranked opponent following the previous year's 21-17 win over Mississippi State in the Peach Bowl. The victory catapulted the Tar Heels to a 10-2 regular season before falling to Alabama in the Gator Bowl.
"In the South, where there's so much football tradition, we have trouble getting mentioned with the perennial powerhouses," Brown told the West Coast media after the game. "We wanted to get some national exposure, playing a game of USC's stature. Ten to 12 years down the road, we hope to be mentioned along with those other powers. If we are, we'll look to this game as a big step forward."
For long-time Tar Heel fans who had weathered the storm of Clemson's 15 wins over Carolina in the previous 18 years (by a 382-204 margin, nonetheless) ... who still felt the sting of the Tigers' 10-8 win in Kenan Stadium in 1981 ... who had witnessed the exodus of top in-state talent across the state line to Charley Pell and Danny Ford's programs for way too long ...
For those fans, the smack-down of the Tigers to open the 1996 season remains one of their favorite all-time Tar Heel wins.
That Southern Cal victory three years earlier helped stake the program to the first apex in Mack Brown's decade-long stint in Chapel Hill; then the program flat-lined for two years with four losses in 1994 and five in 1995. Brown adjusted by going to a West Coast offense in hiring Greg Davis as coordinator and mandated to defensive coordinator Carl Torbush that the Heels use the speed and athleticism harvested in recent recruiting in a more aggressive manner. Thus the 1996 season opened with much anticipation against the backdrop of a west end zone recently cleared of the bleachers and encroaching forest to make room for the current Kenan Football Center.
The tone was set early in the game. Freshman kicker Brian Schmitz nailed the opening kickoff seven yards deep, and on the Tigers' first possession, cornerbacks Dre Bly and Robert Williams made diving pass break-ups while playing the Tiger receivers in bump man-to-man coverage. Seeing such aggressive tactics from the corners was quite shocking indeed around a program that had endured too many "Fly the Friendly Skies of Carolina" slaps over the years.
"The kick-off and the two plays by the corners set the tone," Brown said.
The Tar Heels led 10-0 at halftime with Davis and junior transfer QB Chris Keldorf carefully hunting and pecking their way through the new offense. Then the Heels exploded in the third quarter, with Keldorf hitting L.C. Stevens with strikes of 14 and 45 yards for touchdowns. The Carolina defense allowed Clemson only 91 yards of offense, and the Heels collected four turnovers and gave up only one.
"Coach Davis made it really easy for me today," Keldorf said. "We went dink, dink, dink with the short stuff and then got the secondary coming up. Then we hit them with L.C. It worked perfectly. I had all day to throw, the line gave me great protection. Look, no dirt on my uniform. I didn't even need a shower."
The following week, the Tar Heels traveled to Syracuse in the aftermath of Hurricane Fran and collected a 27-10 win in the pulsating Carrier Dome. They were on their way to a 10-2 season and domination of West Virginia in the Gator Bowl and then followed with an 11-1 campaign and 42-3 landslide over Virginia Tech in the Gator Bowl.
And so the 2010 Tar Heels travel to Atlanta Saturday to open against LSU in the Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Game. If ever a team was in need of an opening game shot of adrenalin, this game certainly qualifies.
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.
