University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Monday Musings
October 13, 2014 | Football, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
By Turner Walston
“We're close,” freshman tailback Elijah Hood said following the Tar Heels' 50-43 loss to Notre Dame “We were just couple of mistakes away from winning that game, so it's just letting you know that when we play to our potential, we can play with anybody.”
Certainly a loss is a loss is a loss, but a close loss in an evenly-played game in the home of a Top 5 opponent feels a lot better than a blowout in just about any other situation. That feeling of being almost there, almost at the point of putting it all together, was a sentiment shared by Hood's teammates.
“We know that we can play at a high level,” Mack Hollins said on Saturday. “That's the number five team in the nation, and we competed with them and honestly should have won the game. So, we know, second half of the season (if) we can do that, we can play like that we'll win out.”
After watching film of the Notre Dame game, Larry Fedora said the Tar Heels planned to build on their performance in South Bend. “There were many bright spots. There were some things that we were able to take from this game, and hopefully we'll be able to grow on and we'll be a better football team because of it.”
The biggest reason for Carolina's performance against the Irish was quarterback Marquise Williams, who was able to establish a rhythm with the offense and stayed in the game after a fast start. Williams became the first Tar Heel in school history to throw for 300 or more yards and rush for 100. He scored passing (twice), he scored rushing and he caught a touchdown pass. For his efforts, Williams was named the ACC's Offensive Back of the Week.
“The toughness and grittiness . . . on top of how he performed was really good,” Fedora said of Williams. “It wasn't alway stat he made the best decisions in the game, but he made up for it in heart and want-to and provided a spark for our football team to give us a chance to win the game.”
Fedora said it was too early in the week to decide whether Williams would continue as the team's every-series quarterback or if redshirt freshman Mitch Trubisky would play certain series, as he did prior to Notre Dame. “He had a good feel, we had good flow, we had a good tempo going, a good rhythm going, and so we said if that was going to happen, and we've said that before that we wouldn't do anything and in this game we did have a good flowing,” he said. “It's one of the few games we've had early where we've started fast and had some things going well in the first quarter. So, that's why we decided to do what we did.”
Williams' effectiveness on offense impacted the other side of the ball as well. When the Tar Heels were moving the chains and using the clock, they gave the defense a chance to catch their breath, an opportunity to be more effective themselves against the Irish attack. In previous weeks, when the no-huddle spread offense often went three-and-out, the Tar Heel defense found themselves right back on the field, right back on their heels trying to keep a team from scoring.
There were mistakes made in all three phases of the game for the Tar Heels, and ultimately the result was a fourth-straight loss. But the team takes confidence from knowing that even though the played an imperfect game, they battled with one of the nation's best teams. The task this week will be to take that confidence into practice and preparing for Georgia Tech and the second half of the season.
“I think that our football team came out of that understanding that if we take care of ourselves, we can play with anybody,” Fedora said. “We take care of us, we give ourselves a chance to win against anybody.”
