Saturday night will mark the third consecutive season Carolina will take the field as a ranked team under head coach Mack Brown. Tar Heel fans everywhere are hoping the results look more like 2020 and less like 2021.
It’s hard not to think about last year as UNC prepares for Pittsburgh. At No. 21, Carolina’s ranking mirrors the last time it appeared in the AP Poll. The Tar Heels promptly fell out of it for good after a humiliating 45-22 loss at Georgia Tech.
Brown was adamant then that UNC’s preseason ranking of No. 10 was far too high. This week, Brown said he was pleased Carolina had found its way back into the polls, but downplayed its importance to his overall goals for the season.
“It’s fun to be ranked. The guys haven’t had a lot of attention this year,” Brown said Monday. “A lot of people are talking about the Coastal [Division] race. A lot of people are talking about the conference championship game. And I told [the players], ‘Let’s put all of that to bed on Sunday.’ Really and truly, the ranking at the end of the year is the only one that matters. Because you’re one loss away from being back out of it anyway.”
As for how the players responded to their shiny new ranking, Brown said the group once again set itself apart from last year’s team.
“I said, ‘You’re 21st,’ and they went, ‘Hey, that’s good,'” said Brown. “And then [linebacker] Cedric Gray said, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. Let’s go back to work.’ So I do think they’re maturing. I don’t think it’ll make any difference to them.”
Maturity and keeping a level head seemed to be a common refrain among the entire coaching staff. UNC defensive coach Gene Chizik, whose unit will be responsible for containing Pitt’s electric running back Izzy Abanikanda, said while the defense has struggled at times, he hasn’t seen in-fighting or chemistry issues. Rather, Chizik said the constant push for improvement has shown itself through game-clinching stops in recent weeks.
“They don’t panic. And we can adjust when we need to adjust,” Chizik said. “When we’re not playing well, there’s no finger-pointing. Everybody just moves forward in a positive direction. And I think that’s a huge reason why in a lot of these games that are close and [have] come down to the end, even though there’s times when we haven’t played great, we have found a way to win most of these games. I think that’s a definite positive attribute to our guys.”
On the other side of the ball, offensive coordinator Phil Longo said maturity has shown itself in the unit’s flexibility. While quarterback Drake Maye has proven himself to be a passing star both in the conference and nationally, Longo said the Tar Heels can also be a run-first team, depending on what the defense shows. He said one critical lesson he’s been teaching Maye is to treat each snap as unique.
“Every play is its own world,” said Longo. “And it’s probably the thing I say most to Drake: we have to play every play like it’s its own game, it’s its own world, it’s its own single entity. That’s it. And we can’t let a negative or a positive from the previous play affect us on the next one.”
Brown and the rest of the coaching staff don’t like to talk about it, but at 6-1 and 3-0 in the conference, Carolina can take an even tighter stranglehold on the Coastal Division with a win Saturday. Analytics give UNC upwards of an 85 percent chance to win the division as things stand currently.
In the non-conference picture, the Tar Heels have already clinched bowl eligibility for the fourth straight year. But Brown said while a bowl game was a goal this year, the team’s strong record proves some of the loftier ones are within reach.
“I think it’s a pride factor that they’ve already won as many as they did last year when they played 13 games,” Brown said. “But I do feel like that it gives them more motivation. Because now you’ve reached one of those goals, and that’s to have a [bowl] game. And now you’re trying to see how high that level can go from this point to the end.”
Featured image via Inside Carolina/Jim Hawkins
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