University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Dare to Believe
August 30, 2016 | Football, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
By Turner Walston
Larry Fedora is excited. Mitch Trubisky is excited. Elijah Hood, Des Lawrence? They're excited. That much was made clear at Monday's first game-week press conference of the 2016 North Carolina football season.
Just four days from now, the Tar Heels kick off the season with the Georgia Bulldogs. It's a tough test for the defending ACC Coastal Division champions, one that will quickly give the program a sense of how far they've come, and indeed how far they have yet to go. No Tar Heel team has defeated an FBS opponent in a season opener since 2000, when Carolina took down Tulsa under Carl Torbush. Since then, Carolina is 0-8 against FBS opponents and 7-0 against FCS schools in game one. Oklahoma, Miami Ohio, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Rutgers, LSU and twice South Carolina have felled the Heels to begin the season since 2001. Will Georgia be next?
The Tar Heels don't believe so. Belief. It's something that this Tar Heel team has, more than perhaps any other in the last 19 seasons. Belief, because they've proven their mettle. It's no longer just about potential.
Last year, the Tar Heels had an idea of what they were capable of, what they might be able to accomplish if they put scheme, skill and will together in the right combination. The players knew how close they came to knocking off the Gamecocks in Charlotte a year ago, to beating an SEC opponent at a neutral site. And so immediately afterward, they dedicated themselves to one another, to the goals of an ACC division championship and a state championship. They then reeled off 11 straight wins, proving to the college football world –and most importantly, to themselves– that North Carolina can win on the gridiron.
So the 2016 Tar Heels' belief that they can knock off Georgia, despite what the oddsmakers and poll voters say, is based not in fantasy, not in some unrealized potential, but in the truth that they put forward a year ago, to the foundation they now get to build upon.
With the Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Classic annually pitting an ACC team against an SEC team, there is some talk of conference bragging rights ahead of Saturday. The SEC has claimed eight of the last ten college football national championships; the ACC has one. In the waning moments, the winning school's fans may begin to chant for their conference, but the truth is those fans, and the players and coaches, want to win the game for their school. They want to begin the season 1-0. There are three ACC/SEC matchups this weekend. Florida State fans are thinking about Ole Miss. Clemson fans are ready to tangle with Auburn. Are they cheering for the Tar Heels against Georgia? Only insofar as a win over an SEC opponent elevates the conference as a whole. Only because if the Seminoles defeat the Tar Heels in Tallahassee in October, or the Tigers do so in the conference championship game, they'd like to beat a team that will have beaten Georgia.
As for the Tar Heels?
"They expect to win," Fedora said Monday. "I don't know if they know who's favored or not –I don't know who's favored or who's not– because none of that really matters. When you get in the game, you've got to play. I think all I can ask from our guys is they walk out onto that field and expect to win. If they do that, we'll be alright."
The Tar Heels expect to win because they proved to themselves that they know how to do so. That belief about the Tar Heels themselves, not about Georgia or Kirby Smart or Greyson Lambert or Nick Chubb. And so when Nick Weiler said he doesn't expect to need to make a game-winning kick on Saturday, because "I think we're going to win by more than just a field goal," it's because he's seen this team coalesce and find ways to win big games before.
Maybe Weiler's comments are bulletin board material in Athens; I don't know. Maybe Lawrence, responding to the question of whether the SEC is far and a way the best conference in the land, saying "Not in my eyes," is being discussed somewhere on talk radio. How dare the Tar Heels expect to win? How dare Lawrence besmirch the reputation of the be-all, end-all conference (he didn't)? How dare Weiler express confidence in his teammates?
Twelve years ago, one Gerald Sensabaugh expressed confidence ahead of the Tar Heels' October 30 date with No. 4 Miami. Carolina was 3-4. Miami was 6-0. Sensabaugh dared to say that the Hurricanes weren't all that special, that they didn't look all that different from teams that he'd seen before. Nationally-syndicated radio host Jim Rome picked up Sensabaugh's comments and ran with them. Rome didn't have much to say after Carolina's 31-28 win.
This year's Tar Heels aren't 3-4, aren't speaking to potential so much as the experience of winning division and state championships last year. Their confidence is grounded in that experience. They know that the loss to South Carolina last year put them in a hole that they then climbed out of to build a magical season, and that a win in Atlanta can help them go even higher in 2016.
"What helped is we won 11 straight games last year," Hood said of the confidence the team takes into Saturday. "We know we've got a lot of the guys back, so we know we have the same group of guys and we just made sure that we didn't slack off any this off-season, and in fact I think we tried to work harder. We tried to push ourselves further along. The confidence level with the team I think is higher this year than maybe at the beginning of last year, so that definitely should help out a lot."
Carolina and Georgia face off on Saturday. Dare to believe.
