University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Broken Record
November 7, 2011 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Nov. 7, 2011
by Lee Pace
Believe it or not, the Tar Heels have been here before. They know the plot line, they've seen the flashbacks in their nightmares. They've heard the lyrics skip and repeat, skip and repeat like an old vinyl 45 record.
"It's hard to believe they have beaten us five years in a row. It's got to stop. Next year, we'll get the `W.'"
"This is like a broken record. This gets old. I'm tired of hearing everyone talk about it. I'm tired of losing. But it's gonna end."
"It hard to believe we lost to N.C. State again. We've been looking to this game all year."
Thus spoke Jason Stanicek, Natrone Means and Bernardo Harris 19 years ago after N.C. State had skewered the Tar Heels by a 27-20 margin in an electric and jam-packed Kenan Stadium, notching win No. 5 running for the Wolfpack of coach Dick Sheridan over the Tar Heels of coach Mack Brown. That week, believe it or not, was punctuated with talk of the state championship, each institution's respective graduation rates for football players, motivational tricks and X-and-O gamesmanship.
"There is nothing new under the sun," as the book of Ecclesiastes tells us. Indeed, what goes around, comes around, and this rivalry between the Tar Heels and Wolfpack has been marked by streakiness. Over the last 50 years, there have been seven periods of one team reeling off at least three wins in a row over the other, and at the moment the Wolfpack is enjoying a half-decade run of wins just as it did from 1988-92. The fifth came Saturday afternoon in Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh as the Wolfpack defense stoned a Tar Heel offense to 165 total yards in a 13-0 victory.
"This is a great win," State coach Tom O'Brien said. "It's a great win for this football team. Kids in that locker room and even coaches on this coaching staff have never lost to North Carolina. But all we did today was tie the record. Next year, we get to try and set it."
In the opposite locker room, Tar Heel coach Everett Withers acknowledged the aggravation of his team's fourth loss of the season and fifth straight to the Wolfpack.
"It bothers me an awful lot to lose any game," Withers said. "I think in this state, this is a big game. This is supposed to be a rivalry and it's supposed to eat at you. It's supposed to get to you when you lose it and you're supposed to remember it and get better and come back the next year and do something about it."
Four years ago in Raleigh it was a 17-0 State blitzkrieg to start the game that proved too much for the Tar Heels to overcome in a four-point loss.
Three years ago in Chapel Hill it was a complete Wolfpack beat-down after the Heels fumbled their first two possessions and State cruised by 31 points.
Two years ago back in Raleigh it was a Tar Heel fumble inside the one yard-line, squirrely play in the Carolina secondary in the second half and a blocked Casey Barth field goal late in the game that allowed State a one-point win.
And one year ago in Kenan Stadium, who'll forget the "Hail Searcy" tipped ball in the end zone that the Wolfpack snared for a touchdown and Russell Wilson's all-around wizardry in a four-point decision?
This year the result was the same but the storyline quite different. Carolina's offense was so flaccid that it had minus-seven yards total production in the first quarter, five 3-and-out possessions in the first half and didn't get inside the Wolfpack 30 yard-line until the fourth quarter. It was the first time the Tar Heels did not score a point in a Raleigh in this series in 90 years.
Blockers at times whiffed on pass protections and at others N.C. State adroitly schemed its way into getting linebackers Audie Cole and Terrell Manning untouched into free pursuit windows.
Receivers dropped passes.
Quarterback Bryn Renner threw into coverage.
Carolina wasted a time out when only 10 men were on the field.
Renner and Jheranie Boyd were on different pages on one snap, Boyd running one route, Renner expecting another and trying to stop his launch mid-motion, the result being a ball that popped from his hand like a wounded duck.
The day's proceedings were encapsulated into one second quarter snap. From the Carolina 22 yard-line, Renner hit Dwight Jones on the left side at the 35. A Wolfpack defender missed the tackle and Jones sped unheeded for an apparent 78-yard touchdown. But the play came back because right tackle Brennan Williams was flagged for holding as he reached with his left arm and hand to block Art Norman as he stormed between Williams and guard Travis Bond. Meanwhile, Cole was not blocked, stormed Renner and hit him after the throw, leaving Renner stunned and gimpy and holding his left shoulder after the play. That would be the first of a run of hits on Renner that left him with "concussion-like symptoms" and prompted his benching in the third quarter.
"It was just like, `You've got to be kidding me,'" said QB Braden Hanson, who played much of the second half in Renner's place. "That was the way this game was going. It was really tough."
"I followed the play down the field, turned around and saw the flag," guard Jonathan Cooper said. "I couldn't believe it."
The first half was a field-position disaster for the Tar Heels given their offensive woes and a 32-yard punting average by sophomore C.J. Feagles. Freshman Tommy Hibbard won the punting job in preseason and held it for nine games, but his productivity sloughed off as the season wore on and opponents starting generating more punt rush. The punters are charted throughout the week by operation time, distance, hang time and directional accuracy, and Feagles won the job last week.
"Every day in practice, it's a competition," Withers said. "If a guy doesn't play well, then we play the best guy in there. That's for every position."
State started three first-half possessions on the Tar Heel side of the 50 and no worse than its 28 yard-line. The Carolina defense actually played quite well given that it got no help from the offense or kicking game.
"We were just trying to get a first down," Hanson said. "That was the biggest thing. We just needed to get a couple of first downs. We were hoping if we could score, we could change the whole momentum of the game."
"I guess you just have to give credit to N.C. State's defense," Cooper said. "I don't think it's a lack of effort or intensity. They had a pretty good scheme and they had good players to carry it out. They had linebackers making plays, filling gaps. I guess there were some errors and mistakes on our part, too. We tried our best to protect but they just seemed to leak through in some spots."
When it was over, the media picked and pried among Withers and a handful of Tar Heels along the "Who wants it more?" storyline that has dominated since the regimes of Butch Davis and O'Brien began in 2007. Davis flippantly insisted every game of 12 was equally important while O'Brien came to Raleigh and said he understood from his 15 years at Virginia the "Anybody But Carolina" rule and that "it was probably founded here in Raleigh."
Withers took the initiative last week in asserting that beating State was, in fact, a primary goal of the 2011 Tar Heels. A native of Charlotte and boyhood fan of the Tar Heels, Withers understood that sky blue and fire-engine red don't mix. Anyone who couldn't see the intensity and focus ratcheted up around the program, its practices and its people last week wasn't looking. Withers himself took things a bit too far by making some remarks about State's graduation rates that lit a fire under O'Brien and his players. It just goes to show that in this current dry spell, the Tar Heels can't win if they're nonchalant and can't win if they're lasered-in.
"I don't think it had anything to do with intensity, emotions," Withers said. "It was about X's and O's and not blocking them and not tacking them and not doing those things."
"We were prepared, we were fired up, we were ready to go," Hanson added. "We just weren't able to execute. I don't know what the magic is."
There was a time when Stanicek, Means and Harris couldn't capture the magic, either, but that, too, did pass, and the Tar Heels went on to win seven straight over the Wolfpack.
Lee Pace is in his 22nd season writing "Extra Points" and eighth covering Carolina games on the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network. He and the network crew address your questions about the Tar Heels each week on the pregame show; submit them for consideration to asktheheels@gmail.com.
