CHAPEL HILL – Mack Brown nailed it during his postgame press conference following North Carolina’s 48-21 rout of NC State on Saturday at Kenan Stadium.

“One game right now, in my estimation, doesn’t lead to another as much as it used to,” Brown said. “It’s the team that plays the best Saturday.”

Sounds simple and rather no-brainer-ish, but he’s so right.

It’s not the best team overall, just the best team that day. And that’s an on-going lesson his team is accumulating as each week passes. You can be better on paper than your opponent, but you still must outplay them to win.

The Tar Heels went into last week’s game at struggling Florida State ranked No. 5 and maybe not quite ready for the moment. They found out that reality in ugly fashion in spite of their late-game push.

But that wasn’t who this team and program are. It was one game – one really bad one for the most part – but it was chock full of some serious education.

And so was Saturday and the week leading up to the No. 14 Tar Heels’ romp over the No. 23 Wolfpack.

Carolina had a huge checklist of things that needed attention, and it achieved most of that this week:

Readiness? Check.

Physicality? Check.

Force some turnovers? Check.

Run defense? Check.

Special teams? Well, this wasn’t a perfect game, so the Heels will continue trying to upgrade there.

Great preparation? Absolutely.

Senior linebacker Chazz Surratt said he knew Tuesday and Wednesday they would play well this week because practice went well. Conversely, Brown said last Saturday night in Tallahassee his team didn’t have a particularly good week of practice. He sensed what happened was coming.

So the Heels learned. To better stop the run you need to prepare better. To be in position to force turnovers, you need to prepare better. And to put your foot on a team’s throat and pull away, as Carolina did in the second half here, at one point outscoring the Pack 34-7 spanning the final minute of the first half, a team must carry the right disposition. And then, once building steam they can unleash knockout blows.

Carolina did that.

The Heels also used chatter outside the program to fuel them some. Rolling at No. 5 probably wasn’t the best time to listen to all the praise showering them before FSU, especially since it was all so new. But, turning around that philosophy with the negatives is just fine. Fuel, no matter how it comes, is a good thing.

“I think we heard the outside noise that we were having problems stopping the run,” Surratt said. “Coming in, I talked to Tomon (Fox), Hop (Tyrone Hopper), Ray (Vohasek), Tomari (Fox), me and (Jeremiah) Gemmel, we came together and were like, ‘Look, we’ve got to go out there and show these people what we can really do. So I think it was a group effort. I’m really proud of how everybody did today.”

What did the Tar Heels do against State’s solid running attack? Try 34 yards on 19 attempts, which is just 1.9 per attempt. Considering the last two opponents amassed 501 yards on the ground, that was a huge step forward.

So were the four turnovers Carolina forced. Entering with just two on the season, the Heels picked off three State passes and fell on a Wolfpack fumble. Surratt, by the way, forced one and picked off another in his return to personal form.

Of course, this was just one game, one day, as Brown was alluding to. But it showed how these Heels tossed to the side some suspect performances and marched forward. That’s how good teams and programs become really good teams and programs.

North Carolina took a step in that direction Saturday. It wasn’t a complete game, but it was on that course, and that’s the kind of performance that can feed into another.