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Bad Night
UNC tailbacks were held down in opening game
AP Photo
Brooks Foster and quarterback T.J. Yates celebrate after Foster caught a touchdown pass.
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Published: September 1, 2008
The ACC football season is off and running, but North Carolina isn't.
UNC struggled to generate rushing yardage by its running backs in its season opener Saturday night, its 35-27 win against McNeese State in Chapel Hill.
The Tar Heels had to rely on receiver Brandon Tate and quarterback T.J. Yates to fend off a determined opponent.
The running game is among several problems that Coach Butch Davis will work on in the next 11 days before UNC plays at Rutgers on Sept. 11. a Thursday night.
"We didn't execute to the level that we certainly expected to play at," Davis said. "We've got a long ways to go. There's a lot of things that we can learn from this (game). Hopefully this next week we can spend a lot of time working on us and not too awful much about the opponent."
UNC rushed for 163 yards and two touchdowns but the total does not reflect how the tailbacks struggled. Tate supplied 106 yards rushing on three carries while on his way to the most prolific all-purpose yardage game in school history.
Tate became the first receiver in UNC history to rush for 100 yards in a game while amassing 397 all-purpose yards. Tailbacks Greg Little, Shaun Draughn and Ryan Houston combined for 69 yards on 22 carries, an average of 3.13 yards, and scored the touchdowns.
Little, a sophomore, was expected to be the solution to the running-game woes but he never got into a rhythm all night in rushing 14 times for 37 yards and averaging 2.6 yards per carry. Draughn, moved to tailback from the secondary early in summer practice, ran hard and showed quickness in carrying seven times for 30 yards.
Davis thought that Draughn, a 6-0, 205-pound sophomore, provided a spark after entering the game in the third quarter and helping UNC go ahead 35-20 after trailing 20-14.
"We had anticipated Shaun getting into the ballgame probably earlier but we never really got into any kind of a rhythm or a flow," Davis said. "He protected the football well. He was a little over-antsy on a couple of the cuts early but he got a little bit better feel for it as the game went on."
Davis cited at least two reasons for the running game's shortcomings.
Davis suspects that he and his coaching staff put too much early emphasis on establishing the running game after it was nonexistent for much of the 2007 season. McNeese State played eight-man defensive fronts designed to stop the running game and Davis thought that he did not adjust quickly enough and use more passing plays.
"We have been slightly hardheaded," Davis said. "Some of the big plays we got in the passing game were things that were there because of the nature of which they were playing defense."
Davis was not satisfied with the play of either the offensive line or the defensive line. Garrett Reynolds, a senior tackle, and Kyle Jolly, a junior tackle, had a combined handful of good blocks, in Davis' estimation, but the line as a whole did not supply the blocking needed to get the tailbacks free.
"We didn't execute the way we needed to execute, and that's just the bottom line," Davis said. "(McNeese State) played well. We knew that they were going to have very, very fast athletic linebackers and you had to take great angles to get to the junction points to be able to execute the blocks.
"We needed better point-of-attack blocking to minimize some of their penetration. And that's on us. That's a matter of execution by the offensive line, the tight ends, the fullbacks, the wide receivers. If they're in an eight-man front we've got somebody responsible for that eighth guy. We don't by design intentionally leave unblocked guys standing in the hole."
■ Bill Cole can be reached at bcole@wsjournal.com.
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