CHAPEL HILL – While Mack Brown is looking hard to figure out North Carolina’s identity, he’s having to do so as his team fights off ghosts from the two abysmal seasons that precipitated his return to UNC.
The Tar Heels won just five games combined in 2017 and 2018 but started out this season with thrilling wins over South Carolina and Miami. Confident, exhilarated and riding high, the Heels felt nearly invincible, only that they weren’t at all.
Losses to Wake Forest and Appalachian State over the last eight days have brought the Heels crashing to the Kenan Stadium earth amidst a rubble of questions, inexperience, injuries and a wobbling direction.
Amazing to think this when just two weeks ago perhaps no program was skyrocketing away from its former self quicker than UNC. Now, the Tar Heels have more resembled last year’s club than they’d care to acknowledge. But the hints are certainly there and they know it.
“The message was that we’re trying to figure out who we are,” Brown said afterward, when asked what his main message to the team was following its 34-31 loss to Appalachian State on Saturday. “I said, ‘You guys, seems like when bad things happen … you get down and that doesn’t work.’
“That doesn’t work in life and that doesn’t work in football. It’s something you can’t do. The harder things get, the more animated you’ve got to be, the more you have to pull together instead of split apart.”
Now to the really hard part. Identifying where that comes from isn’t exactly rocket science, but accepting its is.
“There are some scars there that we have to overcome,” the Hall of Fame coach said.
There. That says it right there.
Even with the first two wins, Carolina still doesn’t know how to win. Late-game comebacks are great, but such an approach on a weekly basis simply isn’t sustainable. Learning how to win requires a team start games well and keep it going for most of the four quarters.
UNC’s play has been up and down with swings that press the boundaries of bad and excellence often shifting back and forth. And with it has come accompanying mood swings. Play well and they're up, play poorly and they're down. Sometimes from possession to possession.
The Heels were low Saturday evening, very low. Lower than they were high two weeks ago?
“Absolutely,” junior wide receiver Beau Corrales said. “Once you get a taste of winning you definitely don’t want to go back to losing. And if you had told me that we were going to be 2-2 right after the Miami game heading into Clemson week, I would have laughed at it.”
One more time, there you have it. Right there.
UNC football under Mack Brown didn’t want to be in full rebuild mode, but it clearly is in some crucial areas. The Tar Heels don’t know how to win yet in part because they have no clue who they are. It’s a process that requires full respect for all opponents, equal preparation, knowing oneself and avoiding the yo-yo mentality that leads to yo-yo play on the field.
Four games in, we know the Tar Heels have some very workable parts but not a lot of them, so there's little room for error. They're also carrying the weight of what spiraled the program from 11 wins in 2015 to five the last two seasons. That’s a trajectory that takes time to recover from.
And as much as Brown and his staff have UNC's nose turned in the right direction, it still has a ton of growing to do. Among the tasks, healing those scars.
