University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Believe It
October 1, 2016 | Football, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
I'm not sure how to tell you this, but none of this makes sense.
Carolina beat Florida State in Tallahassee on a 54-yard field goal as time expired. This came one week after Carolina beat Pitt in Chapel Hill after trailing by 13 points with seven minutes left.
It's not exactly clear just yet what Larry Fedora is doing with Tar Heel football. Or maybe it is: he's making Mitch Trubisky believe, and Ryan Switzer believe, and Naz Jones believe. But here's the most impressive thing he could possibly do: he's making you believe.
This is Carolina football. You understand what that means, I think. We get close, in the good years. But we never quite get there. Judgement Day against Florida State in 1997. Antwan Harris. Butch. You understand.
So when Florida State zips down the field to score the go-ahead touchdown with 23 seconds left, we've seen this before. We sigh, and sink back into the couch, and we think that we have seen this before, lots of times. We knew it, truthfully, when Carolina's last extra point was blocked. Oh yes. Of course. So that is how it will end, with a critical blocked extra point. How novel...and yet how Carolina football.
Do you understand how rare Saturday's win was? It was the second road win over a top-12 AP team since 1970. Mitch Trubisky was two years old the last time it happened, in 1996 at Syracuse.
It was just the fifth road win over a top-12 AP team since Larry Fedora was born. The Carolina head coach is 54 years old.
I called my dad after Saturday's game. He has been a Carolina football fan since 1951 and his mother used to wait on Charlie Justice at the Carolina Coffee Shop. This is what he said when he picked up the phone, before he ever said hello: "54 yards! If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it!"
This is precisely what the program needed. Not to be greedy here, but in the wake of the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Tar Heels didn't need to just win. The Tar Heels needed to be fun and needed to be believable. In the Fedora era alone, we've had the Gio game, and the first-ever Coastal championship, and the Pitt comeback, and the miracle in Tallahassee, and…well, you kind of want to know what comes next, don't you?
That's exactly what Tar Heel football needed. Football Saturdays in Chapel Hill are fun again. Do you want to be the one who misses whatever craziness happens the next time the Tar Heels take the field? Of course you don't—of course you can't. Next week's home game against Virginia Tech suddenly seems like an absolute can't-miss appointment. Don't have a game time? Oh well, clear the entire day and plan to make a weekend of it.
To those of you who are new to Carolina football: we envy you, a little. You take these types of wins for granted, maybe. If you're a UNC undergrad, you've never known any coach other than Fedora, so you missed the years when a complete pass was really, really exciting. You missed 3-9 and 2-10 and 59-7 and The Troubles.
You're lucky, sort of. But you don't really, completely understand what's happening here. This is a group of really good kids and a coaching staff that loves college football who have somehow turned into some of the best drama in sports. This is one of the first times in our lives that we've lived this instead of watching some other team do it on television. It's so much bigger than just winning one or two games. It's changing the entire way we've thought for decades.
Eventually, repeated wins like this develop a culture of expectation. That will be fun, when that happens (the ancient among us remember when Tar Heel football fans were disappointed to go to the Gator Bowl). But I hope none of us, not a single one, forget what it's like on this particular Saturday night, when it all seems so completely amazing that Carolina football could be winning games like this.
Honk the horn, scream in your living room, run down the football field doing the tomahawk chop. Right now, anything could happen and the historically impossible is completely possible.
This is Carolina football in the year 2016. May it build a generation of believers who think this is normal, at the same time we never forget that we have never, ever seen anything like this.
