For all the disappointment the 2021 football season brought to Carolina fans, 2022 has made up for it with pleasant surprises. The Tar Heels, who began the year picked to finish third in the ACC Coastal Division, now sit atop the heap at 7-1 overall and 4-0 in conference play. And despite being unranked in preseason polls, Carolina sits at No. 17 in the first edition of this year’s College Football Playoff rankings, which were released Tuesday.
But according to head coach Mack Brown, all that notoriety comes with a price.
“We’ve gone from being the team that nobody talked about to the one now that’s got the target on our back,” Brown said. “So we’re gonna get the best out of four good teams for the next four weeks, and that’ll be a fun challenge for us.”
The first of those four teams will be Virginia, who hosts Carolina in Charlottesville this Saturday. The Cavaliers have struggled in their first season under head coach Tony Elliott and suffered a heartbreaking loss in four overtimes against Miami last weekend. Virginia’s defense remained a bright spot, as the Cavaliers have not allowed an offensive touchdown in their last two full games of football.
UNC offensive coordinator Phil Longo said the defense’s multiple and varied sets present a unique challenge for the Tar Heels.
“They give you enough of everything else that you have to work against everything,” Longo said, “and you’ve got to be prepared from an assignment standpoint against everything. So this week, probably the biggest concern after looking at them… is a little bit of the multiplicity that they have schematically.”
Helming the Virginia offense is senior quarterback Brennan Armstrong. Carolina fans are sure to remember Armstrong’s name, as he threw for more than 550 yards against the Tar Heels in Kenan Stadium last season. Armstrong also accounted for four total touchdowns in UNC’s last visit to Charlottesville in the 2020 season, an upset victory for the Cavaliers over a then-ranked Carolina team.
Though Armstrong has struggled in 2022, UNC defensive coach Gene Chizik said he is still high on the lefty’s abilities.
“He’s a threat,” Chizik said. “And offensively, they’ve had some moments where they go up and down the field. I think [inconsistency would probably] be what you see the most – but when it comes to him as the quarterback, he is the same very talented, very skilled guy that’s got great open-field mobility and scares you as a runner.”
Carolina won last year’s meeting with the Cavaliers, but had dropped four straight to them before that. As for Brown’s record in Charlottesville, it’s fair to say the Hall of Famer enjoys other road trips more. Brown has never won a road game at Virginia.
Perhaps the most famous of those games came in 1996, when No. 6 Carolina blew a 17-3 fourth quarter lead and fell 20-17 on a field goal in the final minute. A 95-yard pick-six by the Cavaliers sparked the rally which sent UNC to its second loss of the season.
Still, Brown shrugged off the idea of a Charlottesville “curse.”
“I’ve never lost or won a game,” Brown said. “Players do, and that’s it. People talk about curses; half of this team’s never even been to Charlottesville. We’re talking about one week not carrying over to the next; one year, or the ‘Curse from 1996’ damn sure doesn’t. Some of these [players] weren’t alive. I could move on without that being an issue in my life.”
If the Tar Heels can break Brown’s “curse,” they would need three other games in the division to fall their way to clinch a trip to Charlotte for the conference title game. And while fans will be on the lookout for results from Duke, Georgia Tech and Miami, Brown dismissed the notion of scoreboard watching.
“You start talking about the scenarios in the Coastal; none of that matter,” he said. “You’ve got to be good enough to win. If you win, it takes care of itself. If you don’t, it takes care of itself as well. So if you’re good enough to win the Coastal, good for you. Go prove it, don’t talk about it. We don’t need scenarios. We need to win.”
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications/Jeffrey A. Camarati
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