In its attempt to become the first football team in UNC history to reach 12 wins in a single season, the No. 10 Tar Heels are in Orlando on Tuesday for the Russell Athletic Bowl, where they will look to defeat the No. 17 Baylor Bears—a team similar to UNC in more ways than one.
The fireworks the 11-2 Tar Heels have unleashed this season on offense have the team ranked first nationally in yards per play (7.33).
Second place in that category, however, belongs to the Bears (7.25), who run a nearly identical scheme to the one used by UNC head coach Larry Fedora.
Marquise Williams will get one final chance to shine in a Tar Heel uniform against Baylor. (Smith Cameron Photography)
“They’re pretty phenomenal in what they do,” Fedora said. “When they say they spread the field, they spread the field. They widen you out. Those receivers will be outside the numbers.
“That’s a lot of room to cover to stop the running game,” the coach continued. “And you gotta make a decision—what you’re gonna do–because they can beat you with [the run or the pass].”
Injuries have decimated Baylor’s personnel heading into the season finale. Once 8-0 and a prime playoff contender, the Bears come into this game at 9-3 after losing their top two quarterbacks and the man many consider to be the best receiver in college football—Biletnikoff Award winner Corey Coleman.
Despite those setbacks, Fedora is still wary of sleeping on any offense put together by Baylor head coach Art Briles, who was a prominent high school coach in Texas in the mid-1990’s while Fedora was an assistant nearby at—of all places—Baylor.
“I remember him showing me his call sheet one day for a game,” Fedora said about Briles. “And it was a piece of paper.
“First of all, I’d had to have a magnifying glass just to read all of it,” he added. “Every centimeter of the paper was taken up in handwritten calls. It was pretty cool.”
The game itself is expected to be played in warp-speed thanks to the philosophies of both coaches.
Because of that, though, one mistake could turn into a big deficit on the scoreboard.
Baylor will be down to its third-string quarterback, Chris Johnson, for the bowl game. (AP Photo/ Tony Gutierrez)
It will be up to UNC senior quarterback Marquise Williams—playing in his final game—to keep this group on pace for all four quarters against the athletic Baylor pass rush.
If he can do that, the 2015 team will emphatically leave its lasting mark in Chapel Hill—the happy ending Williams and his fellow seniors have desperately searched for since arriving on campus just a few, short years ago.
“We wanna win this 12th game,” Williams said. “We wanna leave our legacy. And that’s the thing.
“Juniors, sophomores, freshmen—they wanna win that 12th game. They wanna send us out on a good note, so we can always remember that we won 12 games.”
Broadcast Information:
The Tar Heels’ quest for 12 wins will kick-off Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. and can be heard on WCHL’s airwaves (97.9 FM, 1360 AM). It will also be televised on ESPN.
Game Notes:
- This marks the first time UNC has played in a bowl game in which both teams were ranked since the 1996 Gator Bowl when the No. 10 Tar Heels beat No. 25 West Virginia.
- UNC junior kicker Nick Weiler is 19-of-22 on field goal attempts this season, and has tallied 119 points–just seven shy of the school record set by Don McCauley in 1970.
- Carolina is the first ACC team since 1991 (Clemson) to play in an Orlando bowl game after completing an undefeated regular season conference schedule.
- This year’s Russell Athletic Bowl marks just the second matchup between teams with a combined 20 wins (2013- Louisville vs. Miami).
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