For two weeks, the North Carolina football team practiced tirelessly, looking to rejuvenate its offense while preparing to face Georgia Tech’s run-heavy, triple-option attack.
But when the time expired in last Saturday’s game against the Yellow Jackets, the stat sheet showed the Tar Heels had surrendered 428 total yards of offense while failing to score in the second half.
UNC’s two weeks of hard work had been rendered meaningless as the 28-20 loss to Georgia Tech dropped the team to 1-2 on the season.
The Tar Heels, however, are in a familiar position. Last season, the team headed into its fourth game of the year with the same record, and then defeated East Carolina 27-6 — the first of four consecutive wins.
Saturday, UNC will face the Pirates again, hoping to bounce back from a rough start to the year just as it did last season.
“As you can expect, coming out of the game that you felt like we had plenty of chances to win, on Sunday … it was like we were at a funeral. But I thought today was good,” offensive coordinator Blake Anderson said after UNC’s first practice of the week Tuesday.
“We were in a really similar place a year ago … I’m just reminding them we rallied from that — we got better every week.”
Preparing to face a pass-first East Carolina offense, different from what the Tar Heels saw in Georgia Tech, coach Larry Fedora said the team’s defense has to completely shift its focus, going back to what it worked on at the start of the year.
“It’s from one end of the spectrum to the other so the defense has to make a quick turnaround,” he said. “They’ve got to put everything out of their head that they’ve been working on for the last two weeks and go back to what we’ve done from the beginning — all the things we’ve worked on during fall camp.”
