AJ: Tough Breaks, Tough Times
CHAPEL HILL – That was tough.
North Carolina fans, your pain is felt in this corner.
Your team did plenty to beat nemesis Virginia Tech under the lights at Kenan Stadium on Saturday night. But for whatever reason, and it’s not hard to draw some clear conclusions if you truly care to, it just wasn’t in the cards for the Tar Heels.
Their 22-19 loss to the Hokies is going to be very difficult for the fans and every member of the football program to get over. And who can blame them?
Human nature nests within the world of athletics. It’s revealed constantly, so forgive the Tar Heels if this one takes longer than usual to move on from.
While that is happening, however, the defeat serves up another notch in what is fast becoming a rapid decline in which there appears no way of altering its trajectory. If that was going to occur, this was the night to shift the course of UNC football.
Virginia Tech came to Chapel Hill a wounded team with an unusually so-so defense. Teams that lose to a terrible Old Dominion squad giving up 49 points in the process are just not very good. We saw that Saturday, as the Hokies should have lost this game.
But they didn’t. UNC lost fair and square.
It lost amid an array of self-inflicted wounds that give the impression nights like this in seasons like this saddled next to seasons like last fall are part of some cruel script determined to never once deviate.
An example?
True freshman quarterback Cade Fortin was breathing life into the Tar Heels but then got whacked five yards from the end zone finishing his night and perhaps his season just as it was getting started.
That’s not Fedora’s fault, but the myriad miscues that continue to weigh down the Tar Heels are. As much as some may not want to realize this, it’s become who and what this program is.
North Carolina is a program that scores just 19 points despite gobbling up 522 yards. It’s a program that allows an 18-play, 98-yard scoring drive over the final six minutes to lose a game. It’s a program that reaches an opponent’s 26-yard-line or better nine times on the night and scores just one touchdown.
It’s a program in which players drop wide open passes that would have been touchdowns, get called for holding nullifying a scoring run, fumble at the one-yard-line, miss makeable field goals, allow a 12-yard quarterback run on fourth-and-9 with less than a minute remaining in a game it held the lead.
And it’s a program that has now lost 16 of its last 21 games, has failed to score at least 20 points in 10 of its last 14 contests versus FBS teams, hasn’t won a bowl game in five years and is on course to fail at notching a winning regular season record in four of the last six years.
It’s also a program in which its head coach sounded more like a first-year coach in a rebuild following Saturday’s loss than one who is seven seasons and 72 games into his UNC tenure:
“I will say this, we’ve got a lot of guys that truly believe in what we’re doing and in each other, and they’re doing the things that we ask them to do,” Fedora said. “We will get there. It just takes one guy making one play and it’s a different ball game, and when we come in here and we’re happy. We didn’t make that play tonight.”
The Tar Heels haven’t made that play much at all over the last couple of years.
Carolina was well prepared Saturday. It had a very good game plan and the staff did a nice job, by and large. Maybe the players are at fault for this one.
But, UNC football has reached a point where shoe polish can only do so much. This game is in the books, and when lined up with most of the last 21 outcomes, it bears a familiar look.