Beyond the Good, Bad, & Ugly Report: UNC/East Carolina

That giant thud you heard last night was any hope of Carolina’s football season rebounding from a disastrous 2017 coming to crashing halt.

It’s not just that UNC lost to an ECU team that was reeling from a loss to FCS opponent North Carolina A&T last week. The Pirates completely dominated the Tar Heels in the second half and out-played Carolina in nearly all phases of the game. After some glimmers of hope from the offense in the second half last week against Cal and an unexpectedly promising performance by the defense against the Golden Bears, UNC laid an egg of epic proportions in Greenville Saturday afternoon. The Tar Heels, an unlikely two touchdown favorite, lost by 22 points and probably put the Larry Fedora era in Chapel Hill on life support.

The game started well enough, in that the Tar Heels moved quickly and efficiently down the field before stalling in the red zone and settling for a field goal. The troubles began on the Pirates’ first possession, when ECU gashed UNC’s defense for an answering touchdown. Carolina answered with another field goal (a troubling sign in that the Heels couldn’t find the end zone) and what would be their only touchdown. UNC would go to the locker room with over 300 yards of total offense but trailing 21-19. Unfortunately the Carolina offense would not bother to show for the second half (and the defense wasn’t much better) while getting blown out 20-0 and giving up one of the worst losses in the past decade.

Along the way we saw all the hallmarks of the worst of Carolina football: stupid penalties, horrific offensive line play, poor clock management, and questionable play calling. Of course everything looks worse after a terrible loss, but it is hard to pull much positive from UNC’s effort in Dowdy-Ficklen. Carolina’s best player by a mile was place-kicker Freeman Jones, who has proven to be quite a weapon after going 4-4 on field goals and being perfect on the season thus far. The second-best Tar Heel was likely punter Hunter Lent, who averaged nearly 45 yards per punt, broke off a 60-yarder, and put three inside the 20. Ohio State transfer Antonio Williams rushed for 96 yards in the first half but was ejected after a targeting call blocking downfield for Anthony Ratliff-Williams. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to write home about.

If you are looking for glass-half-full optimism, QB Nathan Elliott was a respectable 22-38 for 219 yards, but more importantly no interceptions. For the second straight game, the patchwork offensive line, featuring a senior walk-on playing his first career game at center, did not allow any sacks. The Heels generated nearly 200 yards on the ground and a crisp 6.4 yards per rush.

On the other side, the defense that had looked relatively sharp against Cal looked dreadful against the Pirates, who struggled against A&T just six days prior. ECU hung 510 yards of offense on Carolina and was 11-19 on 3rd down. In consecutive weeks, the Tar Heel receivers struggled to get separation from defenders, and the “jump ball to ARW” play could only be successful so many times. The Heels committed 7 first-half penalties for 65 yards, including a late hit that kept a Pirate drive alive and resulted in a touchdown when the defense had forced a stop. And while UNC did not commit another penalty in the game, the offense generated only 93 yards the entire second half (and 32 of those were on the final drive). Twice Carolina attempted to go for it on 4th-and-1, only to be stuffed. Again, it’s not so much that the Heels lost to the Pirates; in the legislatively-mandated Kobayashi Maru game, it typically means more to the team in purple than the team in blue, and Greenville is a notoriously difficult place to play. But the fact that UNC didn’t even really put up a fight after halftime and having the game end in a rout is just about the worst possible outcome.

At the end of the day, with the Carolina program staggering and facing perhaps one of the few programs in America in worse shape than they were, the Tar Heels laid an egg of monstrous proportions. As our good friend Sherrell McMillan tweeted:

After stumbling in their openers, one team got better from week one to week two, and one team got markedly worse (narrator: it wasn’t UNC that got better). After getting a free pass on last season’s 3-9 season based on A) the division title just two years before and B) a stunning, unprecedented amount of injuries, Larry Fedora has burned through all his 2018 good-will capital before Carolina even plays a game in Kenan Stadium. And with three of the next four games against ranked opponents, UNC finds itself in the toughest stretch of its schedule in the worst shape it could possibly be in. It is fitting that this Saturday’s game against Central Florida is being threatened by a hurricane because Carolina’s season – and Larry Fedora’s tenure as UNC’s head coach –  were likely blown away with Saturday’s events in Greenville.