CHAPEL HILL – North Carolina Coach Mack Brown met with the media Monday for his weekly press conference to discuss what was learned and his thoughts about the loss last Thursday at Pittsburgh, his quarterback situation with Sam Howell possibly not playing this weekend, seniors walking for their final home game, and much more.
Above is the full video of Brown’s presser and below are some notes and pulled quotes from what he had to say:
**************************************************************************************
**************************************************************************************
*The Tar Heels struggled on defense in the first half at Pitt, allowing more than 300 yards and trailing 23-7 at halftime. Pitt should have had more points, but it left some on the field. But in the second half, the Tar Heels played as well as they have all season, especially considering they were going up against one of the top offenses in the nation.
UNC kept Pitt from scoring on seven of its last eight offensive possessions of regulation, allowing yardage totals on those possessions of 2, 7, 52, minus-6, 40, 12, 0, and 28. The lone scoring drive was a four-play, 77-yarder. And, Panthers QB Kenny Pickett completed six passes for 20 or more yards in the first half, but had none afterward. In total, the Panthers amassed just 74 total yards in the second half.
“Defensively, I thought it was our best game,” Brown said. “And they held us in the game and gave us a chance to win.”
*UNC’s issue with penalties reached a span of five consecutive games with the Heels being flagged 12 times for 105 yards in the loss at Pittsburgh. UNC had 27 penalties for a total of 261 yards through the first five games, but over the last five, it has committed 54 penalties for 510 yards.
Brown is not pleased with it, but he has sort of an explanation, part of which he couldn’t go into, as clearly there are some issues with some of the officiating in the ACC.
“The other thing that is driving me nuts, and I don’t know why we continue to have too many penalties,” Brown said. “We’ve got officials in practice; we don’t have many (penalties) in practice and we have entirely too many in games.”
Brown was asked later in the presser about this issue, so he went deeper into it.
“I have to be careful when I talk about officiating,” he said. “Number one, the last four teams have been really good teams, and normally, the better athletes you play against the more likely you are to have some penalties because they’re really, really good…
“We’re going to have some penalties, everybody is, but what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to get rid of the stupid penalties. The things that are a lack of discipline. You’re gonna have some, you’re going to have a holding call every now and then, and you may have a pass interference, because those are judgment calls.
“And the other thing that we continue to do, and I feel like officiating is harder than ever before because we see more of it because we’ve got TV and replays on every call. I’ve said it once before, but I wish you all could what should have been called and what’s called once we get our reports back from the ACC office every Tuesday. I think that would be more fair to our team and our coaches. But that’s not going to happen.”
*Brown took issue with a flag not being thrown on the play in which center Brian Anderson snapped the ball prematurely to Sam Howell, causing the UNC quarterback to scramble for the ball and heave it past the end zone to avoid a disaster. The problem, and UNC has sent the tape to the ACC, is that multiple Panthers were clapping in pre-snap, mimicking what Howell does to trigger the snap from the center.
That is an infraction, but the officials missed it. Had it been called, UNC would have had first-and-goal at the Pitt 1-yard-line.
“When I talk about the clapping on the goal line, it’s not fair to our kids,” Brown said. “That’s not whining. The game’s fast, it’s harder than ever for officials to call than ever before, but I still say that something like that should be taken upstairs. That should be reviewable, because that is a critical point in that ballgame, and nobody wanted to miss that.
“But if you’ve got five guys clapping and you have a bad snap, and Sam did an amazing job of taking that ball and throwing it out of bounds to keep the ball. But we lose a snap and we’re rattled. And that should not happen.”
*Some Tar Heels are approaching noteworthy milestones: Running back Ty Chandler needs 74 yards to reach the 1,000-yard mark for the season, and he needs only 28 yards to hit 3,000 for his college career, the first four years of which were at Tennessee.
“Ty has been a great signee for us and he’s done that things that we needed to do…,” Brown said. “So Ty Chandler has had a great college career at both of his programs.”
Sophomore wide receiver Josh Downs is 113 yards away from matching Hakeem Nicks’ single-season school record of 1,222 receiving yards, a mark he set in 2008. Plus, Downs is 14 catches shy of Ryan Switzer’s single-season mark of 96 set in 2016.
“So, he’s in a great position for this weekend,” Brown said about Downs.
*The Tar Heels host Wofford on Saturday in a game that on paper should not be competitive. The Terriers are 1-9 overall and 0-8 in the Southern Conference, which is in the FCS. Wofford has lost nine consecutive games.
But Brown warned Monday, and will make sure his team understands, that Wofford isn’t to be taken lightly. The Terriers lost 27-24 at home to Samford on Oct. 16, and why this matters is Samford scored 52 points and racked up 530 total yards and 28 first downs in a 70-52 loss at Florida this past weekend, a game the Bulldogs actually led 42-35 at halftime and trailed just 56-52 with just over nine minutes remaining.
“You need to jump out on teams like this and not let them get excited,” Brown said. “Obviously, the Samford-Florida thing scares every coach in the country. You say it can’t happen to you – just watch it.”
