North Carolina finished the 2020 football season with an 8-4 record and clearly on an upward trajectory.

The Tar Heels played three top-10 teams in their last four games and acquitted themselves quite well routing Miami on the road and competing until the very end with Notre Dame and Texas A&M.

Two head-scratching losses at Florida State and Virginia also marked the season, but they also served as clear lessons for a program very much still in the growing and in the discovery process.

So, as THI continues closing the book on this past season, here are 5 Takeaways from UNC’s offense for this past season:

The main reason North Carolina’s offense was borderline great this season was because of its run game. Any time a team has a potential number one pick at quarterback, who will start next season as one of the Heisman Trophy front runners, yet produces two 1,000-yard rushers (in a shortened season) and ends up ranked No. 11 in rushing the football, that team has an outstanding ground game and offense.

Michael Carter and Javonte Williams regularly gashed opposing defenses. They ran with power, they ran around the edge, they peeled away from the second and third levels, and they simply got the job done. Their last game, combining for 540 yards in a 62-26 win at Miami, was their swan song in Carolina blue, and it was historic.

The offensive line, which returns in tact next season, deserves a ton of the credit, as do the wide receivers for their blocking, as does quarterback Sam Howell, whose expertise handing the RPOs was often a thing of beauty and contributed big-time to the ground success.

Carolina finished averaging 235.8 yards per game and averaged 5.8 yards per attempt on the season.

Barring the unforeseen, Sam Howell will leave UNC following his junior season as the top quarterback in school history, and it won’t really be close. Carolina has had some pretty good ones this century, but Howell is just on a different level, as we saw this past season when he completed 68.1 percent of his pass attempts for 3,586 yards, 30 touchdowns and just seven interceptions. He also scored five rushing touchdowns.

Howell improved his overall accuracy from his freshman season, moving up seven percentage points, including hitting short stuff over the middle, and he was quicker, more elusive and got an extra few yards when scrambling much of the time as opposed to his first season. He had 16 runs of 10 or more yards and picked up 23 first downs with his legs, vast improvements over five runs of 10 or more yards and 13 rushing first downs from his freshman campaign. His long run this fall went for 30 yards.

Howell’s NFL QB rating as a freshman was 111.8, this past season it was 121.9. His passing grade improved from 82.0 to 92.3 and running grade went from 53.0 to 72.5.

He also became more of a vocal leader, which will be an important role for him next season with Michael Carter having moved on.

One last thing, Howell now has 18 touchdown passes with no interceptions in his UNC career in the fourth quarter, and he has yet thrown an interception in the red zone.

The offensive line didn’t grade out as well as the naked might have expected, but the more important numbers are the statistics the Tar Heels generated. UNC set several school records for which the OL deserves much of the credit:

*41.7 points per game passing the previous mark of 40.7 set in 2015.

*537.2 total yards per game shattering the previous mark of 486.9 set in 2015.

*Averaged 7.6 yards per play, passing the previous mark of 7.3 yards per play set in 2015.

This club likely would have broken more records had it played more than 12 games. The 2015 Tar Heels won the Coastal Division and played in the ACC championship game and a bowl, so it played 14 games.

This year’s Heels had two 1,000-yard rushers for the first time since 1993 when Leon and Curtis Johnson both reached the mark.

One area that still clearly needs work is pass protection. Howell was quicker and more mobile this season, but he was still sacked 34 times, compared to 37 a year ago in one more game played. Twenty of the sacks occurred in UNC’s four losses with just 14 in the eight victories, thus clearly illustrating the importance for better pass protection moving forward.

Otherwise, the line grew, developed terrific chemistry, cut down on the penalties over the season, and paved the way for the most prolific Carolina offense in history. Not bad.

The Tar Heels moved up from No. 31 in the nation in red zone offense in 2019 to No. 23 this past season, going from an 89.1 percent success rate to 89.3 percent. Modest improvement, but only on the surface. Peel away the onion and the real understanding of how much better the Heels were surfaces.

Those numbers include made field goals, and the criticism of Carolina a year ago and offensive coordinator Phil Longo in his career is a low touchdown percentage. But that argument cannot be advanced for this past season.

In 2019, UNC scored touchdowns 56.4 percent of the times it got into the red zone, but in 2020, the Heels did so 73.2 percent of the time. Comparing to the rest of the nation, the Tar Heels finished fourth in red zone TD percentage behind only BYU (78.7 percent), Alabama (77.4 percent), and Coastal Carolina (75 percent), thus making the Tar Heels No. 2 in TD rate in the red zone among Power 5 teams.

Furthermore, UNC is second in the nation in red zone rushing touchdowns with 28 behind Alabama’s 30.

Credit here goes to literally everyone involved in UNC’s offense. Carolina does score plenty of TDs in the red zone, as it showed this season.

Another remarkable statistic for this UNC team is that the Tar Heels scored touchdowns on their first possession in nine of its 12 games. Remarkably, in one of the games they didn’t, the Heels defeated Wake Forest, 59-53, scoring on its next four possessions, and by the end of the game set a school record with 742 total yards.

Another time was versus Texas A&M in the Orange Bowl, yet the Heels still scored on five of their first eight possessions in the game, not including the end of the first half when they ran one play and ran out the clock.

The list:

*Syracuse – One TD

*At Boston College – First two possessions with 2 TDs

*Virginia Tech – First three possessions with 3 TDs

*At Florida State – NONE (did not score on first six possessions)

*NC State – One TD

*At Virginia – First four possessions with 2 TDs and 2 FGs

*At Duke – First seven possessions with 7 TDs – end of half not counted)

*Wake Forest – NONE (but scored on its next four possessions)

*Notre Dame – First two possessions with 2 TDs

*Western Carolina – First three possessions with 3 TDs

*At Miami – First seven possessions with 5 TDs and 2 FGs – end of half not included)

*Vs. Texas &AM – None (but did score on five of first eight possessions)

Having this kind of success right out of the gate speaks to the game plan, preparation, and readiness to perform. This is an awfully impressive characteristic of this team.