For UNC, after another loss in Atlanta, cycle of inexplicably bad defense is real curse
It was all there for North Carolina football as recently as two weeks ago, after a resounding victory against Miami that felt like the arrival of everything Mack Brown had been building toward since his return in late 2018.
The Tar Heels had won their first six games, most of them decisive victories; they’d put themselves in the national conversation, an intangible but desired achievement in college football’s nebulous hierarchy; they’d emerged as a favorite to play for the ACC championship in Charlotte and, who knows – a College Football Playoff berth suddenly seemed possible, too. Weighty stuff, all.
And then came an inexplicable defeat against Virginia that brought everything back to Earth. With it, though, arrived a different kind of opportunity for the Tar Heels. They now had the chance, on Saturday, to prove their resilience and mettle at Georgia Tech, and do so in a city full of unkind memories. All they needed to do was go down to Atlanta, exorcise all those demons, and establish a new narrative and maybe even a new identity.
That the Virginia game was but a blip — a disappointing one-off. That UNC, long prone to curious defeats, really was a changed program. That if it could win in Atlanta, of all places, then all the old rules surrounding UNC football — the ones that have kept the sleeping giant in a slumber; the ones that have long conspired to make this program appear cursed — no longer applied.
And then, well – and then three and a half hours came and went, Saturday night blending into Sunday morning and, by the end of all that transpired, Brown looked bleary-eyed and beaten down, like a man who desperately wanted to understand what he’d just witnessed, but couldn’t. “Awful,” is a word he used to describe the Tar Heels’ defense, and in response to various questions he kept repeating different versions of a troubling realization: “I don’t know.”
It looked after the Tar Heels’ 46-42 defeat at Georgia Tech that Brown had just received some kind of awful news. His expression was one of disbelief and shock, like the one the emperor might have worn when informed he wasn’t wearing any clothes, after all. In this case, Brown had just realized that five years into his second tenure at UNC, he still didn’t have a reliable defense — that the one he thought he had was, apparently, an imposter.
Brown had no answers after the Tar Heels’ lost to Georgia Tech, just as his team’s defense had no answers during it. He sounded tired and stunned and this was “one of those, I didn’t know what to say,” he told reporters afterward. “And I’ve been doing this 35 years … I thought we were beyond that on defense.”
So did everybody. But we were fooled.
As recently as the afternoon of Oct. 21, UNC was in the midst of its best start in more than 25 years. It’d been that long, not since the height of Brown’s first UNC tenure in 1997, since the Tar Heels had won their first six games. They’d ascended into the top 10 of the national rankings. Those impossible, crazy dreams UNC supporters have long held didn’t seem so crazy anymore.
An ACC championship for the first time since 1980? Well within the realm.
A College Football Playoff appearance? Why not? TCU defied the odds and made it just last year.
But now, how foolish and naive that talk looks after the past two Saturdays. On the most recent of them, the Tar Heels continued their run of confounding performances in Atlanta. And, indeed, for a team and program with a long history of failure in this city, UNC arrived at a particularly concerning scene, one full of bewitching spectacle.
For one, it was Halloween weekend, with people roaming around in various stages of creepy or comical dress. The full moon that steadily rose over Bobby Dodd Stadium only added to the haunting ambience. Meanwhile, the comedy of errors on the field — the inability to put the Yellow Jackets away, or even come close to making a tackle, at times — only bolstered the paranoia that, yes, maybe curses are real. Maybe UNC really was been hexed in this town. How else to explain it?
‘We didn’t know what we were doing defensively’
The notion of a curse, though, was a mirage; the bad juju only the residual build-up from all of the Tar Heels’ failings here, self-inflicted or otherwise. There wasn’t some malevolent, invisible force holding UNC back Saturday night. There was, only, another Gene Chizik game plan laid to waste by an opponent that exploited the Tar Heels’ lack of preparation or ability to adjust.
Chizik, UNC’s defensive coordinator, is well-compensated to put his players in the best position to succeed. And yet here was Cedric Gray, the Tar Heels’ senior linebacker and one of the team’s captains, after he and his teammates allowed 635 yards Saturday night (348 of them of the rushing variety):
“I think one of the biggest things, especially in the first half, that I don’t think that we handled really well was the tempo. A lot of times we weren’t able to set up, guys were running around. And I felt like we kind of just looked a little lost as a defense in the first half.”
And that was the first half. The second half, “a little bit of the same thing,” Gray said. “Tempo.”
A little later, Gray described the breakdown in more blunt terms.
“Confused,” he said of the UNC defense. “In my view, it felt like we didn’t know what we were doing defensively.”
Damning words from a player of Gray’s caliber and experience. Sad words, given the sense of helplessness they contained. How could Gray and his teammates not have been prepared for Georgia Tech’s fast-paced playing style? How could they not have known what they were doing? What was a week of practice for, if not to prepare for those things?
UNC “talked about” Georgia Tech’s offense, and the speed with which the Yellow Jackets attempt to execute it, Gray said. It wasn’t so much a matter of not understanding what Georgia Tech was going to do, but the complete inability to counter it, or defend it. Listening to Gray late Saturday night provided a sense of deja vu, a flashback to other moments when UNC players were left to try to explain inexplicable defensive performances, ones in which they looked lost.
Such offerings have become familiar during Chizik’s time as defensive coordinator, both last year and during his first go-round at UNC in 2015 and ‘16. At times, and maybe even most of the time, overall, his defenses have been sound enough to give the Tar Heels a chance; indeed, in 2015 and last year, UNC won its division in the ACC with those defenses. Chizik, though, has also been responsible for some of the ugliest breakdowns in school history.
There was the time, in 2015, when Baylor ran for 645 yards (not a typo) in a bowl game victory against UNC. That was the most rushing yardage any team had ever allowed in the history of college football bowl games. And then there was last season, when the Tar Heels gave up 649 yards in a narrow victory at Appalachian State. Saturday night sometimes resembled both the Baylor game and that App State game, with Georgia Tech players running free, inhibited and untouched.
Better talent, same results
To make matters worse now, though, UNC has amassed more defensive talent than it has had in years. This is the season that Brown, a master recruiter, has been anticipating, with the kind of experience and depth that would be the envy of most teams in the country. And yet the defense has regressed the past two weeks — and regressed to the point on Saturday that the defensive futility not only became reminiscent of some of the worst performances in school history, but joined them.
Brown called it a “roller coaster,” this maddening propensity for UNC to look competent defensively for long stretches of a game, or even several games, only to look as though it has never practiced in other moments. He said, “I don’t know what happened; I don’t know what was wrong, other than you have to look at the calls, you have to look at the ability of the coaches and you have to look at players when it’s that inconsistent.”
Indeed, now comes a moment of introspection and soul-searching. Brown said his team was “crushed.” Drake Maye, the sophomore quarterback, described the mood among his teammates as “just devastated.” Gray said, with a defiance, that UNC wasn’t going to end this season like it did the last, when it lost four consecutive games. Thing is, though, we’ve seen this show before from the Tar Heels.
They were done in Saturday night, again, not by a curse but by another unexplainable defensive performance.
This story was originally published October 29, 2023 at 9:28 AM.
