With his team facing a 4th-and-5, trailing by a point and the clock ticking toward five minutes remaining, Carolina head coach Mack Brown did something fans might not have expected: he trusted his defense. It was a defense which had given up 34 points and a 14-point first-quarter lead to that point.
But Brown’s belief in the beleaguered unit, combined with a fiery speech from linebacker Cedric Gray, clearly had an effect. Wake’s next two possessions ended in a Cam Kelly interception and a turnover on downs, helping UNC erase the one-point deficit and escape Winston-Salem with a win.
“The last two drives, before we went out on the field, I gathered the defense up and was like, ‘Hey, give it all you got,'” Gray said. “‘Put it all in. Lay it all out. Do what you’ve gotta do. Execute your assignment perfectly, and we’ll come out on top.’ I don’t know if that’s the reason that it happened, but hopefully it helped. And obviously, we got the result that we wanted.”
Kelly, who’d had a rough night before his game-changing interception, said the bounce-back effort proved the defense’s toughness.
“We’ve got so much grit,” Kelly said. “We’ve got so much passion. We just showed that we were the tougher team right there, and ended it with a big play and stops.”
With Kelly, Gray and others on the defense stepping up, the Tar Heels held the powerful Wake offense scoreless in the entire fourth quarter. The Demon Deacons had scored 27 points in the second and third quarters combined. It’s part of a larger trend this season for the defense, which has shown improvement in the second half of ACC games.
Brown praised the work of defensive coach Gene Chizik Saturday night.
“I think you’ve got to give credit to Gene Chizik for just continuing to work through the game and finding ways to make it work,” Brown said. “That’s what he’s done his whole life, and he’s really good at it. If we can just keep scoring and hang in there, our defense is gonna make enough plays to win at the end.”
UNC’s six road wins this year have come by a combined 20 points, with each one being decided by one possession. Needless to say, Carolina Football in 2022 is not for the faint of heart. But though Tar Heel fans may have seen their lives flash before their eyes several times this season, Brown said his team’s composure has stood out all year.
“When you’ve got a team that doesn’t panic, and they keep working with confidence, that’s really a cool thing,” he said. “You have so many young people that panic and give up and get mad and get frustrated, and these kids didn’t do any of that.”
The Tar Heels’ 9-1 record is their best through 10 games since 2015, which ironically is the last time the team won the Coastal Division. And with a culture of trust thriving in the team, there’s no reason to think they can’t climb higher than even that team did.
Featured image via Associated Press/Chuck Burton
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