UNC football wants to be bowl eligible each year. The Military Bowl is the first step.
Mack Brown said it didn’t really dawn on him how much it meant to his players to be in a bowl game until it was announced where they were heading.
He wasn’t with his team that day. The UNC football coach was in New York to support former Texas quarterback Vince Young, who was being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. So he Skyped his team in Chapel Hill before the announcement on Dec. 8.
When it was announced that the Tar Heels were heading to the Dec. 27 Military Bowl where they’ll play Temple, Brown said the only thing he could hear on the phone was screaming, yelling and giggles.
His team was ecstatic.
“Then, to watch them, they’ve got a buzz about them and a confidence about them right now that’s fun to watch,” Brown said in a press conference on Monday.
For the Tar Heels, the moment was huge. They had gone through two losing seasons in 2017 and 2018, a number of injuries and a coaching change.
And a bowl game signified that they had overcome those struggles.
The Tar Heels finished the regular season 6-6. And although they felt they should have won more games, this season was a step in the right direction. A sign of good things to come. They snapped three-game losing streaks to in-state rivals Duke and N.C. State, and almost upset then-No. 1 Clemson.
The season isn’t over
For the past two seasons, UNC junior running back Michael Carter spent his winter breaks working out with his brothers and friends back home in Florida. Those football seasons ended in November.
But this year, Carter was proud to decline their invitation. This year he’ll be in Annapolis playing against Temple (8-4).
“I’m going to get this work up here, in pads,” Carter said with a smile. “But that’s when it really hit me. Like, ‘whoa I’m still out here playing football.’ A lot of people want to do that, and they can’t.”
The Tar Heels clinched bowl eligibility when they beat N.C. State in their final game of the 2019 regular season. Before that game, UNC hadn’t beaten N.C. State since 2015.
The Tar Heels dominated the Wolfpack 41-10 at Carter-Finley Stadium on Nov. 30. UNC players celebrated by taking off their helmets and rolling them on the ground as if they were bowling balls. One of those players was Dazz Newsome, who has a team-leading 64 catches for 947 yards and 8 touchdowns this season.
“I haven’t been to a bowl yet, so you know I was turned up,” Newsome said.
Not enough for UNC to just go to a bowl game
The Tar Heels aren’t satisfied with just being in a bowl game, though. They want to win it, too. UNC’s last bowl win was in 2013, when it beat Cincinnati in Charlotte’s Belk Bowl. Since then, the Tar Heels have ended each season with a loss.
A win here would give UNC its first winning record since 2016, and would end the season on a high note heading into next year.
“It’s a big deal because we’ve been through so much the last two years, my heart hurts,” Carter said. “It just feels good to be here, still standing.
“For the young guys, they don’t know anything else except for ‘go to a bowl game’...They have no idea what not going to a bowl games feels like, and I think that’s the best thing ever...They should be in one every year.”
Carter said getting to a bowl has helped the team understand that they are re-establishing a foundation. Only four years ago they were the Coastal Division champions. They had a shot to win the title this year but it slipped away after close losses to Virginia Tech and Virginia.
But for the past two years, Carter said, UNC football’s foundation had been cracked.
What about now?
“We’re building up,” Carter said.
This story was originally published December 18, 2019 at 5:30 AM.
