UNC Football: Tar Heels look lost in devastating season-opening defeat

The UNC football program had high expectations this season, but an opening-night loss to the Virginia Tech Hokies puts all of that in jeopardy.

Just three hours into their highly anticipated 2021 campaign, the Tar Heels’ season is hanging on by a thread. That is, if they had serious hopes of winning the ACC’s Coastal Division and battling the powerhouse Clemson Tigers for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Let’s face it: That’s the kind of hype that this team had behind it over the past eight months and leading up to their opening-season loss to the Virginia Tech Hokies at Lane Stadium on Friday night. And the Tar Heels didn’t just lose; they lost bad. Don’t let the final score fool you.

Sure, it was only a seven-point margin in finality, but as crazy and disruptive as the raucous home crowd was, this is a program that North Carolina – a preseason top 10 team — has to beat. No matter the circumstances. No excuses. Period.

But they didn’t. And as close as the margin was when the clocks hit double-zero, they lost badly. Despite out-gaining the Hokies 354 to 296 in total yards, the Tar Heels performed poorly in just about every aspect of the game.

The defense came out missing tackles and giving up gaping holes from the very start, and let’s not act like holding the mighty Hokies to 17 points is some massive feat. This isn’t a Virginia Tech squad that’s predicted to compete at a championship level this season, evidenced by their middle-of-the-pack preseason predictions from just about everyone. The UNC defense did come out and play better in the second half, showing more tenacity and aggressiveness getting to the ball, but they still struggled to wrap up and bring their opponent down on a number of key plays.

Then, there was the play of the offensive line. It goes without saying how bad that was. Sam Howell — who was a Heisman Trophy candidate coming into the game — was on the run most of the night. He took a lot of big hits, a number of which came because he had to call his own number so many times en route to one of his worst statistical games ever. Patrick Mahomes would have had a hard time leading the Tar Heels to victory behind that performance up front, so let’s take it easy on blaming Howell for too awful much here — three interceptions or not.

And Howell’s pass-catchers, as much of a misnomer as that might seem like at this point, didn’t do their job either. At least, any of them not named Josh Downs, who was terrific in the first game of his sophomore season. The rest of the wide-outs and tight ends dropped a number of catchable balls, and didn’t make plays in big moments like you’d hope they would in a feisty road contest with the game on the line.

This game recap isn’t going to be like most of the ones before it. I’m not going to rattle off statistics and hash out the runs and receptions and yards and all of the other quantitative things that happened on the gridiron tonight. It’s not worth it. This is one that you just have to throw away, regroup, and come out like a completely different team next week.

Takeaways from this game? Well, it probably can’t get much worse than this.

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