Coastal Favorites?
MIAMI GARDENS, FL – To set the record straight, North Carolina entered its game Saturday at Miami still in contention for the ACC’s Coastal Division title. Yet, the Tar Heels clearly needed some help from other teams to earn a repeat spot in the league’s championship game.
They got some of that help Saturday some 1,400 miles north with Syracuse shocking Virginia Tech at the Carrier Dome.
Meanwhile, at Hard Rock Stadium, the Tar Heels were taking care of business themselves, but using a different formula than what had been the norm in dispatching Miami, 20-13, in one of the most important games of the five-year Larry Fedora era.
A loss to the No. 16 Hurricanes and the Heels would have basically been out of the running for the Coastal crown because they would have needed both the Hokies and Canes to lose three ACC games apiece, and that wasn’t and likely isn’t going to happen.
But two losses? Absolutely a possibility.
“We knew that one loss probably wasn’t going to be the difference in the conference play,” UNC Coach Larry Fedora said Saturday. “I don’t think that our guys thought a whole lot about it, they just knew that we needed to come down to Miami and get a win and whatever happened happened.”
Suddenly, even though Carolina was drilled Oct. 8 at home by Tech, it’s now probably the team to beat.
Among the reasons the Heels are that club right now is, interestingly, it’s defense.
Justifiably maligned pretty much all season, Gene Chizik’s group put forth an outstanding performance against the Canes. It held Miami to 71 yards and 28 points below its season averages. And that highly criticized run defense limited the Hurricanes to 59 yards below their average, a number sort of skewed by a late 42-yard run by Joe Yearby. Thus, the Canes were below 90 yards rushing with 5 minutes left in the game.
In addition, the defense forced five 3-and-outs and a 2-and-out, which ended with a game-sealing turnover. Of Miami’s 36 running plays, 24 went for 3 yards or less, including 15 that went for 2 yards or less. Only one run went for more than 10 yards.
For the second consecutive week, the Heels did not allow a 100-yard rusher after it happened in eight consecutive games dating back to last season. And lastly, the Heels blocked a field goal for the second time in the last three contests.
It wasn’t just the defense, however.
The offense left a lot of points on the field, but it consistently moved the ball amassing 187 yards above what Miami had been allowing. And in not-so-Fedoraesque fashion, Carolina won the time of possession battle possessing the ball for 32:59, courtesy of the Heels converting 14 of 23 3rd-down situations.
Winning in this manner may have been the best thing for the Tar Heels. If nothing else, it gave the staff clear evidence the team is progressing as a whole.
“After several weeks into the season, I’m pretty pleased with where this team is right now, where we sit and the job that they’ve done,” Fedora said. “We’ve got another divisional opponent that’s coming up, and we’ve got to do a great job against them.”
So, with all of that in mind, and the Heels now having registered two road wins over ranked teams in the same season for the first time in school history, and also having won eight straight road games for the first time since the ACC was formed in 1953, UNC enters a five-game stretch to conclude the season.
The Tar Heels visit 2-4 Virginia before having a needed week off, then they will play their final four contests in the Triangle with home games against Georgia Tech, The Citadel and N.C. State with a Thursday night road test at Duke.
The Heels can and likely will get much better, and given what they’ve worked through in recent weeks and that they will be favored in the rest of their games, some by a large margin, they are very much alive in the Coastal race.
Now, if only they can a little more help and someone can beat the Hokies, repeating as division champs appears very realistic.