Among UNC Football’s Many Problems,
One Decade-Long Issue Standing Out
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
The 2024 North Carolina football team has a long list of problems.
The 3-4 Tar Heels have lost four games in a row. They are starting their third-string quarterback. They have the most inexperienced offensive line, by far, in the 17-team Atlantic Coast Conference. They have only a few legitimate All-ACC candidates. They have no quality depth at most positions.
The next time the Heels take the field, Oct. 26 at Virginia, they will be one of only two ACC teams without a single conference victory. They are 0-3 in league play, with consecutive losses to Duke (21-20), Pittsburgh (34-24) and Georgia Tech (41-34), the latter two on their home field at Kenan Stadium.
The loss to the Yellow Jackets last Saturday continued some alarming trends. After a valiant comeback to tie the game 34-34, with overtime seeming likely, Carolina gave up a 68-yard touchdown in the final minute on a simple running play between the tackles.
“Just like Duke and Pittsburgh,” UNC coach Mack Brown said. “They’re all coming down to a play. There’s a thin line between winning and losing.”
Brown’s point has some validity. The Tar Heels’ season-opening 19-17 victory at Minnesota could have gone either way, just as their recent losses to Duke and Georgia Tech could have gone either way.
Similarly, the remainder of Carolina’s regular-season schedule — at 4-2 UVa, at 1-5 Florida State, 2-4 Wake Forest, at 4-3 Boston College, 3-4 NC State — offers neither easy wins nor guaranteed defeats. Given that backdrop, as with many other in-state programs right now, it’s not too late for a bowl to be the goal for this year’s team.
However, Carolina football has a decade-long problem that just won’t go away, and unless the situation improves down the stretch, the 2024 Tar Heels will be the first of Brown’s six teams (during his second tenure in Chapel Hill) to miss the postseason. For perspective, the last time a Brown-coached UNC team fell short of a bowl game was in 1991, before the proliferation of postseason options, when the Heels finished 7-4.
The problem begins with UNC’s defensive line, and it manifests itself primarily in the form of very poor defense against the run. Repeatedly, opposing players are having their biggest rushing outputs of the season against the Tar Heels, and that’s not mere coincidence.
In this year’s conference-only statistics, UNC is dead-last in the ACC in total defense, at 473 yards per game. More specifically, the Tar Heels are dead-last in rushing defense, as they are yielding 232 yards per game and a league-worst 5.6 yards per rushing attempt.
It’s very difficult to win that way, and it’s truly impossible to win consistently that way.
Duke running back Star Thomas opened the 2024 season with 13 carries for only 23 yards against Elon, a Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) opponent. Against Georgia Tech two weeks ago, he had 14 carries for 48 yards. In the Blue Devils’ 21-20 victory over the Tar Heels, Thomas was the game’s most valuable player, with 30 carries for 166 yards and two touchdowns.
Georgia Tech running back Jamal Haynes had very little room to run earlier this season against Syracuse (11 carries for 35 yards) and Louisville (12-25). In the Yellow Jackets’ 41-34 victory over the Tar Heels, he had 19 carries for 170 yards and two touchdowns.
In their 34-24 loss to Pitt, the Tar Heels actually did a very good job of limiting the ground game of the Panthers’ star running back, Western Carolina transfer Desmond Reid, who gained only 55 yards on 18 carries. However, Reid had 11 receptions for 155 yards and a touchdown, and Pitt quarterback Eli Holstein had his highest rushing output against any Football Bowl Division (FBS) opponent this season, with 10 carries for 76 yards and a touchdown.
It’s debatable how much of UNC’s recent inefficiency on the defensive line can be traced to poor coaching/execution versus mediocre personnel (UNC’s talented edge rusher, Kaimon Rucker, has missed most of this season with an injury), but what’s beyond debate is that the Tar Heels have produced infinitely more big-time talents at virtually every other position over the last decade than they have on the defensive line.
During Brown’s first tenure (1988-97) in Chapel Hill, more than a dozen of his defensive linemen went on to become National Football League draft picks, including college and/or NFL stars such as Roy Barker, Reuben Davis, Russell Davis, Ebenezer Ekuban, Greg Ellis, Tim Goad, Cecil Gray, Vonnie Holliday, Marcus Jones, Andre Purvis, Austin Robbins, Oscar Sturgis and Rick Terry. Brown also recruited standouts such as Julius Peppers and Ryan Sims to UNC, although their playing days with the Tar Heels came immediately after the coach’s departure for Texas.
Since 2014, Carolina has had only three defensive linemen selected in the NFL draft: Nazair Jones (third round/2017), Jason Strowbridge (fifth round/2020) and Raymond Vohasek (seventh round/2023). Only Jones spent significant time at the next level.
Unless that long-term trend improves, via some combination of coaching, recruiting and player development, Carolina football likely will remain inconsistent, and sometimes truly terrible (e.g., 70-50 home loss to James Madison this season), on the defensive side of the ball.
In the meantime, the 2024 Tar Heels just hope to scrape together enough big plays in their close games to reach the postseason once again.
“There are so many things we can fix that give us a chance to be a better team and win the last five games,” Brown said, “and that’s what we’ll do.”
