CHAPEL HILL – North Carolina welcomes Georgia State to Kenan Stadium on Saturday night for a 7:30 PM kick in a game the Tar Heels must not only win but play well in doing so.

UNC is coming off a 17-10 loss at Virginia Tech in its opener last Friday night in Blacksburg, VA, and points of emphasis in the days since have been cleaning up the things that went wrong versus the Hokies.

The Panthers opened the season with a 43-10 loss at home to an Army program that has won nine or more games in three of the last four seasons, including last fall.

Georgia State went 6-4 last season, which included beating Western Kentucky, 39-21, in the LendingTree Bowl. The Panthers lost in overtime to Louisiana, which finished the season ranked No. 15 nationally, lost by three points to Appalachian State, and they defeated Georgia Southern, which won eight games.

Here is what some of the Tar Heels’ coaches and players had to say about Georgia State:

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“We’re lucky that we’re playing a good Group of 5 opponent. (GSU Coach) Shawn Elliott, he’s an outstanding coach. He’s been at Division One a long time. He was the interim coach at South Carolina a few years ago…

“Army is an absolute awful opener. You don’t want to spend all your time working on the option. I’ve been told they’ve been working on us for three weeks instead of Army, and like us they left disappointed. They’ll come in here with a great attitude.

“Instead of having some Group of 5 or FCS team that’s not any good, we need a good opponent. We need to get better because we’ve got Virginia coming in next week.”

*Given that GSU faced Army’s triple option, the staff put more emphasis on what the Panthers did toward the end of last season.

“So, we’re looking at who they were last year. They were good, and when you’re good you keep doing what you were doing. They’re very sound, they’ve got good players, their secondary is good. Their linebackers are a little but more inexperienced, but their front is sound. They played two-deep the other day.

“Shawn’s done a good job. He’s got good players. Cornelius Brown, the big quarterback, last year ran up and down the field. He didn’t have his best game the other day, so I’m sure he’ll be, like us offensively, they’re trying to get back on track. And they run an offense about like ours. So, that part of it, defensively it shouldn’t be that hard to adjust to what they're doing.

“Offensively, we’ve just gone back to the last three games of last year that they won and played really well with the same players, and looked at what they were doing against similar offenses like ours.”

“They have a veteran offensive line. I believe all the guys are seniors across the board. Talented quarterback, talented running back, I think they run a good offense. They do a lot of things where they create cut-back lanes trying to get big plays. I think there are some things we can really do to dominate the line of scrimmage for us.”

“They are a really experienced group across the board. They have a very experienced defense – juniors and seniors across the board. We respect them a lot, we’re watching a lot of tape working for them. We’ll be ready for them Saturday.”

“Georgia State’s a good football team. They had a really good year last year, they played some really good teams pretty touch and they beat some good teams last year. They’re really impressive on film. The one thing that stands out to me is they play really hard and they’re physical. They’re a big football team and they’re talented… We’re really impressed with what we’ve seen from Georgia State on defense.”