How UNC’s moral victory against Miami reflected the Tar Heels’ grim reality

At last in this long, grim North Carolina season, one made longer by all the injuries, and the defeats, hope arrived on the Tar Heels’ sideline, and in the sparsely-filled stands at Kenan Stadium, in the final moments of an improbably close game against Miami.

If Larry Fedora, the UNC head coach, had written a storybook ending it might have begun with the kind of circumstances his team encountered on Saturday: a fumble recovery near midfield in the final minutes, the battered, bruised Tar Heels, led by their No. 3 quarterback, with a chance to salvage a little magic in this lost year.

UNC’s sideline, so often a somber place late in games, buzzed with a happy energy. The people who stuck around long enough to see it, and there weren’t many of them, rose in front of their seats. One final touchdown drive would have ended, at least temporarily, a season’s worth of misery.

And then, there was more of the same.

The Tar Heels committed a turnover of their own – a fumble that running back Jordon Brown lost – and the Hurricanes recovered. UNC’s last-minute chance for a victory turned into a 24-19 defeat. It was a moral victory, however, and even those have been difficult to come by for UNC.

More than anything, though, it was a reflection of the Tar Heels’ cursed reality: Even at their best they remain, at times, their own worst enemy. On Saturday, they finished with more yards (428) than Miami (415) and more first downs (27 to 16) and, for once, UNC controlled time of possession.

Based on those numbers, it would have taken a confluence of several calamitous events for the Tar Heels to lose. Things like, for instance, not scoring after reaching the Miami 1-yard line, or throwing three interceptions, or losing a fumble in the final minutes, with one last chance to win.

UNC endured all of those things on Saturday. Perhaps it could have overcome one of them, or two of them. It could not overcome all of them – the four turnovers and the failure to score, early, after one of its best drives of the season stalled after UNC was inches away from crossing the goal line.

“You don’t win when you turn the ball over four times,” Fedora said afterward. “You don’t give yourself a chance when you turn the ball over four times. … That’s what is amazing – we turn that ball over three times and we are still in that game and had a chance to win it.

“And then we turned it over a fourth. That was pretty much the dagger.”

And so now the Tar Heels have lost their 11th consecutive game against a major-conference opponent. They are approaching the one-year anniversary of their last such victory, which came against Georgia Tech on Nov. 5, 2016, and there is no clear end in sight to that run of futility.

The Tar Heels’ loss on Saturday officially eliminates them from postseason contention. It guarantees they will finish the regular season with at least eight defeats, which has happened only 10 other times in school history. Only five times has UNC lost more than eight games.

And yet there’s fight. There was in the literal sense on Saturday, when several tension-filled moments between the Tar Heels and Hurricanes required the intervention of officials. And there was in the figurative sense, too, despite the beating UNC absorbed last weekend in a 59-7 defeat at Virginia Tech.

One of the questions the Tar Heels faced on Saturday is whether they’d surrender, emotionally, after such a defeat. Their answer came throughout a spirited first half, when they held Miami without a touchdown until the final moments of the second quarter.

Cayson Collins, the senior linebacker, said that he reminded his younger teammates throughout the week that “it’s not OK to just roll over.” His senior classmates repeated that sentiment, as well, and the Tar Heels on Saturday played with the vigor of a much more successful team.

“The energy was unreal out there,” said Cole Holcomb, another UNC linebacker. “And we were just out there having fun today.”

Indeed, the fun had bee missing for quite some time. There was no fun for UNC in the 52-point defeat last weekend in Blacksburg, Va., or in the demoralizing defeat at home against Virginia, or in the ugly loss the week before that against Notre Dame.

There has been no fun watching the defeats pile up, and the injury list grow longer. At last, though, the Tar Heels had some fun on Saturday, what with a bevy of trick plays – wide receiver passes and a fake field goal – and a glimmer of hope as time grew shorter.

“We had the juice today,” M.J. Stewart, a senior cornerback, said afterward. “I feel like we had the juice.”

And he and his teammates also had the same rotten luck, much of which UNC created with its own doing. There were the four turnovers, including Brown’s late fumble, which inspired his teammates to console him on the sideline. And then there were also the familiar defensive breakdowns.

The Tar Heels’ defense played well for more than 95 percent of the game. The other times, UNC surrendered a 51-yard touchdown, late in the first half, and a 78-yard touchdown, on the first offensive play of the second half. UNC has made a habit of allowing such plays.

“We’ve got to learn to stay locked in for the whole game,” Holcomb said. “... I mean, we’ve got young guys that don’t understand that it takes 100 percent focus in all the little things.”

After another loss in a season defined by defeat, Holcomb said “it’d be easy” to quit – both amid those kinds of catastrophic failures, and in the context of this long season. But, he said of his teammates, “I respect the heck out of them because they don’t quit.”

And so it was again on Saturday. The Tar Heels gave themselves a chance, despite their turnover woes, and despite losing Chazz Surratt, their starting quarterback, to an injury in the first quarter. The team turned to Nathan Elliott, the third-string quarterback, because back-up Brandon Harris was also hurt.

Elliott personified his team’s dogged grit: rarely did his play come with an aesthetic beauty, but he maneuvered the Tar Heels into scoring position late in the fourth quarter and his 9-yard touchdown pass to Beau Corrales with three minutes remaining cut Miami’s lead to five.

Then, moments later, Collins, the senior linebacker forced a fumble. He embraced the opportunity on Saturday, even it appeared unlikely, on paper, that UNC would be competitive.

“We took it as a challenge,” he said of recovering from the Virginia Tech defeat and preparing for Miami. “We’ve got the No. 8 team in the country coming in, and personally, I don’t feel like they should have been No. 8. There were a lot of games that they won that were close. ...”

The fumble gave UNC hope. A couple of plays later, after a penalty, the Tar Heels moved to the Miami 37-yard line. Then came Brown’s carry, and the ball came loose. The Hurricanes recovered. The Tar Heels’ thought of storybook ending gave way to reality, and the enduring futility persisted.

This story was originally published October 28, 2017 at 6:50 PM with the headline "How UNC’s moral victory against Miami reflected the Tar Heels’ grim reality."