The UNC football program suffered a heartbreaking loss to California on Friday night. Two major plays served as the turning points, both of which were fumbles by the Tar Heels offensive unit.
Unfortunately, those turnovers occurred on North Carolina's first and last offensive plays of the game.
Following the three-point loss, head coach Bill Belichick spoke to the media for just over eight minutes. For those who went to bed (rightly so!) following the conclusion of the game, here's what Belichick had to say regarding his team's efforts:
Belichick's Opening Statement
“Obviously, a real competitive game here. A couple of big mistakes hurt us, but a lot of things we could have done better in all three phases. So just came up a little bit short today, here, a couple of inches, I guess, on the touchdown, on the fumble. But just keep working on things that obviously we need to do a better job of. Third-and-long on defense, third-down conversions on offense, ball security, things like that.”
Kobe Paysour's big performance
“He’s a tough competitor. He’s been like that on special teams and on offense since we’ve had him.”
Assessment of Gio Lopez
“We’ll take a look at it on film. We definitely dropped some passes. I’m sure it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t for any of us, coaches or players. But again, I thought we played competitively. I mean, we had the ball on the one-inch line with a chance to take the lead in the fourth quarter. So I wouldn’t say it was, I mean, that’s what it was. And then we couldn’t get the ball back until it was only 13 seconds left.”
Benjamin Hall (and the running game's) success
“I thought the backs ran hard. The backs ran hard, and they ran with good ball security. You know, Cal blitzes a decent amount. They have some big linebackers. Thought the backs really did a good job stepping up and handling the blitz, too. So, that’s probably the biggest challenge we felt coming into the game was our linebackers picking up those blitzes. And I thought they were pretty competitive on that. So, yeah, running the ball is good. And when there are holes, then those guys hopefully can make yards with the ball in their hands, extra yards beyond what’s blocked. And looked like we did that a few times. So I thought they played good as a group. (Jaylen McGill) gave us a couple of good runs on returns, on kickoff returns. So that was nice to see, too. I thought he, just first glance, looks like he ran the ball pretty well in those situations, too.”
Did the loss show signs of improvement for UNC?
“As I’ve said, we’ve been improving every week, so I’m not going to back off that. I think that’s true. But you can’t turn the ball all over and win. It’s just too hard. And then we’ve got to eliminate some of those kinds of mistakes. We need to tackle better, play better on third down, both sides of the ball. So still, things we need to do that it might have been enough. We hadn’t turned the ball over, but we did, and we didn’t get any turnovers on defense. So until that changes, it’s a little bit of an uphill struggle.”