There is nothing like a season that starts and then immediately takes a break, right? Well, that is how this North Carolina season started and if you forgot that the Tar Heels still played football after not playing in Week 1, no one can blame you. However, the home opener is this weekend against the East Tennessee State Buccaneers, so here are three things to look out for as UNC retakes the gridiron this weekend.
Will the chaos over the bye week cause the team to suffer?
If you have been living under a rock or just don’t like social media, you may not have seen all the stuff that came out following the resignation of GM Michael Lombardi. Regardless, let’s just say for a team that didn’t play, the coaching staff still was mentioned a lot. Now, the players are saying it really didn’t have an effect on them and Belichick was his usual “Onto ETSU” self, but that’s what they were saying last year before the first home game and they had all offseason to get ready before TCU laid the smack down. They only had a bye week this time around. Now even with all the drama, the Heels should easily beat the Buccaneers, but if the game lingers into the second or even third quarters, it may be the beginning of another tumultuous season in Chapel Hill.
Will the running game get on track?
I mentioned this in my flipping the narrative piece — UNC may have beaten TCU, but it wasn’t because of a dominate run game. Additionally, the runner who did the best with his carries (Jaylen McGill, 6.6 ypc) had the fewest carries of all three backs (Benjamin Hall had 11, Demon June had 6 to McGill’s 5). How Bobby Petrino uses the run game this week against a much weaker opponent (ETSU allowed 172 rushing yards and five tds in a loss to Campbell in week 0 and 230 rushing yards and 2 tds in a win over Tusculum in week 1) will probably say a lot about how well he really can adapt and whether or not the offense that kind of petered out in Dublin and started to look eerily similar to the offense the season before has improved.
Will Belichick play the freshmen?
Probably the most dominate game of the season last year came against an FCS squad in the Richmond Spiders. However, despite being up 17 points at halftime and 24 points after three, very few freshmen played in that game, with the most notable being Au’Tori Newkirk who played two snaps. In fact, the starters played deep into the fourth quarter of that game. Again, ETSU is not a great team. They got badly beaten in week 0 by and FCS opponent who went 2-10 last season and were only up 13 at half last week against a DII squad that went 1-9 the past two seasons. This should be a game to work out some kinks in the first half and then play the freshmen in the second half since redshirts no longer exist under the new five in five rule. If Billy Edwards is still running the offense deep into the fourth quarter, then either the game is a lot closer than it should be or all the talk about developing through recruiting was just a lie to buy more time.
What do you think is a key for the game against the Buccaneers? Let us know in the comments below.
