Gap between resurgent UNC and rebuilding NC State as big as Saturday’s final score
Clearing one of the lowest bars out there, North Carolina officially represents the finest football the Triangle has to offer this season. Saturday’s blowout win over N.C. State was the final punctuation on a dismal year for the Wolfpack and a sixth straight win in the rivalry for Mack Brown, 22 years since the last one.
North Carolina’s 41-10 win was largely free of shenanigans, even cordial at the finish, with Sam Howell throwing for a career-high 401 yards 11 years after another star freshman QB -- Russell Wilson -- led the Wolfpack to an upset by the same score. Time is a flat circle, especially in the Triangle.
With Duke’s chances of making a bowl at 5-7 thanks to its graduation rate wiped out earlier Saturday when enough teams elsewhere got to 6-6, only the Tar Heels will be going to a bowl game this season, probably not a great one (although with the ACC’s convoluted selection process, almost anything is possible) but still worth it, not only for all the extra practices but the positive momentum.
That got the Tar Heels to .500, and it’s hard to get too excited about 6-6 unless you’ve won all of five games the previous two seasons. For all the difficult, last-second losses North Carolina had this year, Brown did as asked and promised, injecting enough enthusiasm into the program to propel things forward. And that’s before even considering the nearness all of the Tar Heels’ near misses, all six losses decided by a touchdown or less.
Tack a bowl game onto the Tar Heels’ recruiting success and factor in Howell’s return -- assuming he doesn’t jump to the XFL or something -- and the future is brighter than .500 would necessarily indicate in Chapel Hill.
The Tar Heels would just as soon things proceed in the future the way this game did, a slowish start leading to a runaway: N.C. State led 10-6 at the half in a miserable, soaking rain, but when the skies cleared to start the third quarter the Tar Heels stormed ahead with 28 unanswered points in the quarter on three Javonte Williams touchdowns and a 52-yard pass from Howell to Dyami Brown.
Howell tacked on another touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, his third of the night, to complete an authoritative, dominant second-half performance by North Carolina and a Triangle sweep for the Tar Heels, if only .500 within the state, thanks to the losses to Wake Forest and Appalachian State.
Both of those, like all the others, were by a single possession, underlining how narrow the margins have been for North Carolina, how close this was to a truly magnificent season. That said, the Tar Heels will absolutely take it: at the least, the season-opening win over South Carolina, ending a long streak of failure in that particular scenario, not to mention the rivalry wins over Duke and N.C. State. If the record wasn’t what Brown hoped for in his second first season at North Carolina, everything else has been.
There’s none of that optimism at N.C. State, where the Wolfpack dropped its sixth straight to close out a difficult, injury-plagued season at 4-8. Even if fully healthy, it’s hard to see any obvious areas of automatic improvement next season, especially given the quarterback situation, and Dave Doeren already reshuffled his staff after last season, always the hole card of a coach with few other options.
N.C. State has certainly had its moments in this rivalry under Doeren, but with the inroads North Carolina has made on the recruiting trail under Brown and the Wolfpack in a rebuilding process of indeterminate length, the gap between the programs at the moment appears to be as big as Saturday’s final score.
That’s how it was at the end of Brown’s first stint, when he won five straight after losing five straight to the Wolfpack at the start. As he ran off the field Saturday night with arms raised in triumph, it didn’t take him as long to get there this time around.
This story was originally published November 30, 2019 at 10:49 PM.
