CHAPEL HILL – The most interesting and poignant thing Mack Brown said moments after his team lost 17-10 at Virginia Tech on Friday night was that it was going to be “an uncomfortable couple of days” around the North Carolina football program.
That is what happens when a team performs as did the Tar Heels, certainly in the first half, and with respect to a few other aspects of the game all night.
More than two days later, and now that the coaching staff has dissected all that went wrong in the Tar Heels’ opener in rowdy Blacksburg, what was the most difficult aspect of the last couple of days?
No short answer here.
“We’ve had really, really hard discussions with our coaches about everything,” Brown said Monday morning during his weekly press conference. “I asked the same questions fans asked: ‘Why didn’t we have these few things fixed? Why do we have communication issues? Why’d we have sacks? Why do we have (defensive) penetration on offense? Why aren’t we separating more with our receivers and defensive backs on offense? Why didn’t we catch uncontested balls on both sides of the ball? Why don’t we have more sacks?’
“That’s what we talked about. ‘Why don’t we have more turnovers? Why didn’t we get more punt return yards?’”
Fans were certainly asking most of those questions on social media and other platforms, though it tended to center around the Tar Heels’ readiness for Virginia Tech’s physicality, the pass protection that led to six sacks, and a general inability to move the football like had largely been the norm with Sam Howell at quarterback the last two seasons.
Brown, however, sees it more as a simple issue of his team not being as good as the prognosticators had been saying. They didn’t play like the No. 10 team in the nation because they aren’t.
“We weren’t the 10th best team in the country the way we played Friday night,” he said. “Virginia Tech gets credit for beating a top-10 team, (but) I don’t think we were one.”
Back to the discomfort of those hard conversations. Brown was not happy after the game and his mood suggested Monday morning he hasn’t exactly gotten over how his team played or how the staff got them ready to perform. Pain is a normal byproduct of losing, especially when there is a high care factor.
“I told the guys and the coaches, ‘this game’s not fun and not worth playing when you lose,’” Brown said.
But there is a silver lining. A pretty big one, in fact.
It was just the opener, and few teams in the nation would have come away with a victory over a Virginia Tech team that isn’t exactly post-war rubble, especially playing in front of one of the more passionate atmospheres in the nation.
The crowd and noise affected the Tar Heels, Brown, offensive coordinator Phil Longo, and defensive coordinator Jay Bateman all acknowledged Monday. And no matter how much a staff tries, that simply cannot be simulated in practice.
Yet, the Tar Heels had the ball in Hokies’ territory inside the final minute with Howell appearing primed to work his magic once again. In a way, the script almost played out to everyone’s benefit on the Carolina side, Brow says.
“Probably the best thing that could have happened to us would have been to play like we did, have the struggle that we did against a really good team on the road and come back and win in overtime,” he said.
But that didn’t occur. The Tar Heels lost, honest conversations have taken place, so now what?
“If we had played a poor team at home and blown them out, you probably don’t fix things,” Brown said. “Shame we lost, but (it’s) probably the best thing to happen to us. We’re not the tenth best team in the nation. We got back down to earth. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Our program’s still ahead of where it should be…
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and a lot of those things were exposed on Friday night.”
Exposed, discussed, dissected, learned from, and tucked into a corner.
Georgia State is up this week, and the mission is to avoid another couple of uncomfortable days following that tilt.
Mack Brown Monday Press Conference
