After beginning the year 1-5, the North Carolina football team strung together three wins against three ACC opponents.
One thing that’s helped the Tar Heels in recent weeks? A sense of normalcy. After an erratic early schedule, including two Thursday night games and a bye week in the third week of the season, UNC is finally settling into a rhythm.
“The problems that I saw with the early games was that we weren’t going to be in a normal work week until we got to N.C. State,” coach Larry Fedora said. “It was all the way through. I think we had one week in there where we had a normal week when we didn’t play on a Thursday the week before or we didn’t have an open week the week before or an open week the week after. It was all the way through, halfway through the season before we were going.
“That I was worried about more than anything because we’re creatures of habit and I like to get our guys into a routine as quickly as possible and that makes it much more difficult.”
But Jabari Price said that though the regular schedule is helping the team settle in, it’s not a good excuse for the losses early in the season.
“People have bye weeks and all that stuff to prepare for us, but that’s no excuse,” Price said. “The normal weeks we’ve been having have actually been helping us … it’s a big difference but that can’t be an excuse. We need to stop making excuses and just play.”
Inches
Price said that the 1-5 start to the season was the toughest thing he’s ever experienced, but the senior said the loss to East Carolina was a turning point in the season.
No, the Tar Heels didn’t start winning after the 55-31 drubbing, but they did start improving, Price said.
The key to continuing that improvement was building on the pros and learning from the cons of close losses to Virginia Tech and Miami.
“Basically by pointing out the good and also pointing out the bad,” Price said. “We lost to Miami by inches, we lost to Georgia Tech by inches, lost to (Virginia) Tech, just showing guys that there is hope there and we’re not losing by a long shot. There were the pros and there were cons, but we had to build on those pros, the cons just outweighed the pros.”
The losses were still frustrating, Price said, and he feared that his team was growing to accept losing as the norm. Price and some of the other veteran leaders led the team to channel its frustration into practice.
“(Fedora) texted me after the Miami loss and was like, he didn’t want the team to get complacent with that losing feeling,” Price said. “And that was my biggest fear, everybody thinking that this was a norm, and it’s not. It was the hardest thing we had to do, and we started practicing harder and guys bought into what we were selling.
Running game improving
With quarterback Marquise Williams as the permanent starter, the Tar Heels have another ground threat.
Fedora said the running game has improved the most in the recent weeks.
“The thing that matters the most is that we’re running the ball more effectively,” he said. “When you do that, now everything starts clicking a little bit better because you can start getting into your tempo and you can start moving the chains and you can call your double passes and things that you know that if they are incomplete or we don’t complete the play, we’re not going to be behind the chains because we’ll find a way to pick up the first down.”
Though no one running back stepped up to get a firm grasp on the starting position, the running-back-by-committee strategy has worked thus far for the Tar Heels.
“Maybe we haven’t given a guy the chance to stay in there and do it,” Fedora said. “But I think you look and see when anybody goes in there, they’re fresh and they’re ready to go. Would I love for one guy to just reach up and take it? For sure, I would. But it hasn’t happened yet, and we may be partly to blame for that.”
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