Three days later, the dust is still settling from UNC and App State’s historic encounter in Boone. The game set the Kidd Brewer Stadium turf aflame, as the teams combined for 62 points in the fourth quarter and 124 overall in the 63-61 Carolina victory. For those counting at home, that’s more total points than when the two men’s basketball teams squared off in the Smith Center last season.
And while the Tar Heels escaped with a 2-0 record, a defense giving up 42.5 points per game simply won’t be good enough in ACC play.
UNC head coach Mack Brown didn’t mince words when describing the unit during his Monday press conference.
“They’re embarrassed. They’re disappointed,” Brown said. “We’re not playing as good as we should. We’re not playing as good as we thought we would. And we’ve got to get it fixed. Everybody comes in and says, ‘What’s wrong?’ There’s too many pieces that are wrong. You can’t answer it in one easy thing, or it’d be easy to fix.”
The Mountaineers’ 40 fourth-quarter points far surpassed any levels of defensive folly seen under Jay Bateman’s much-maligned 2021 unit. In fact, the 61 points given up on the day were the most under the second Brown regime in Chapel Hill, and the most by any Tar Heel team since allowing 70 to East Carolina in 2014. Still, Brown said new defensive coach Gene Chizik’s job is safe, just two games into his new gig.
“I’ve got total confidence in Gene Chizik,” said Brown, who also worked with Chizik at Texas. “He’s a tremendous coach and coordinator. He’s obviously not pleased, as our defensive coaches aren’t, with what happened in the fourth quarter. And we’ve got to get it fixed.”
Like Brown, Chizik also did not beat around the bush when assessing the defense’s fourth-quarter performance, calling it “an implosion.” But he also found silver linings from the game, noting several teachable moments.
“There’s a lot of good that can come from this,” he said. “Obviously, it was a performance we wish in the fourth quarter hadn’t happened. But there’s a lot of learning. There’s a lot of teaching. We have to tackle better. I feel like we missed a lot of tackles we shouldn’t have. I feel like that was evident pretty much through most of the game.”
And when it comes to teachable moments, Brown said it is far easier to use those moments effectively when your team is 2-0 versus 1-1.
“When you can win a game like that, where you make so many mistakes in the fourth quarter, it is easier to teach,” he said. “You can be much harder on your team when you win than you can when you lose. Because when you lose, they’re all down. The defense knows we’ve got a lot of things we’ve got to fix. Special teams knows we’ve got a lot of things to fix. But they’re expecting that, and we can be hard on them now, and they will respond.”
That response will have to come in this Saturday’s road game at Georgia State. The Panthers are coming off a Week 1 loss in which they led South Carolina on the road in the second half. No Tar Heel fans need a reminder of what the Gamecocks did to UNC in the most recent meeting. While the crowd in Atlanta will almost certainly not be as frenzied as the one in Boone, four quarters of football will still be played, and the Panthers will have the tape from Carolina’s previous two games. It’s a game almost tailor-made for a letdown after last week’s high (emotion-wise and altitude-wise).
Brown is smart enough and experienced enough to not look past Georgia State and onto Carolina’s upcoming matchup with Notre Dame. And he acknowledged that to turn 2-0 into 3-0, the Tar Heels will simply have to improve in a short period of time.
“We understand we’ve got to get better,” he said. “We’ve got to play to the standard that we are doing sometimes. We’re just a very inconsistent football team. We’ve got to continue to grow offensively, but we’ve got to be better in special teams and defense to have the season that we want.”
Featured image via Inside Carolina/Jim Hawkins
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After 4 years is it not time to cut down on penalties, play some real defense, quit saying that we’ve got to get better, etc? You would think that a “Hall of Fame Coach” would have made the necessary adjustments and actually win some big games and be one of the best teams in the ACC if not the country. But we’re not and well…..
ASU is one if the better teams that Carolina will play on the road this season… period!