Tar Heels prepare for red zone battle

In film study the day after each game, North Carolina football coach Larry Fedora and Offensive Coordinator Blake Anderson engage in a specific ritual when evaluating the team’s offense.

While going through all of UNC’s offensive possessions, the two coaches devote their utmost attention to a certain area of the field — when the Tar Heels are in spitting distance of putting points on the scoreboard.

“That’s one of the things when I come in the next day with Blake is look at all of our red zone possessions and look what happened exactly, what was the breakdown,” Fedora said Monday.

And in UNC’s 27-23 loss to Miami, those breakdowns were obvious. In the team’s five trips to the red zone, the Tar Heels walked away with just one touchdown, settling for three field goals and seeing a fourth get blocked.

So as UNC (1-5, 0-3 ACC) heads into Saturday’s game against Boston College (3-3, 1-2 ACC), a team that boasts the ACC’s No. 3 red zone defense, Fedora said UNC must be better close to the end zone, but that the team’s struggles do not revolve around one problem.

“If we could pinpoint just one thing, we could get that one thing corrected,” he said. “But it’s a breakdown here, it’s a breakdown there — it’s a combination of a lot of things.”

Quarterback Bryn Renner said the team must do whatever it takes to cross the ball over the goal line.

“Defenses obviously know that the offense is about to score, so they turn it up a notch, and we need to do the same thing,” Renner said. “Someone making a play … just scoring in any way possible — I think we haven’t done that in the first six games, and that’s obviously where we need to improve.”

Boston College’s overall defense, however, has struggled this year. The Eagles rank second to last in the conference in total defense, surrendering an average of 425 yards a game.

But Anderson doesn’t want his offense to take the Eagles’ defense, which uses multiple formations and shifts to confuse opponents, too lightly.

“They’ve gone against some pretty dang good offenses and held them in check fairly well at times,” he said. “Clemson has been one of the best offenses in the league for years and they gave them fits.”

With the Eagles fresh off a bye week after dropping their last two ACC games to the Florida State and Clemson, Anderson expects Boston College’s defense to perform well across the board.

“I would think they’d come in here chomping at the bits, a little bit expecting, thinking with our record, ‘Hey, this is one we can win,’” he said. “I think we’ll get there best effort, no doubt.”

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