By Eddy Landreth
Staff Writer
Everett Withers has faced many challenges since he was named interim head football coach at North Carolina.
He invoked disciplinary measures against significant contributors, like Zach Brown and Todd Harrelson.
A tank disguised as Georgia Tech squashed his defense.
And more than a few Tar Heel fans refuse to attend home games.
One doesn’t need to conduct a poll to determine that a portion of those absences are a protest to the firing of former head coach Butch Davis, a move engineered by Chancellor Holden Thorp just days before summer camp convened.
On Saturday, all of that will be past tense. The challenge Withers and his assistants now face is getting the Tar Heels mentally and emotionally prepared to play Louisville on Saturday at noon in Kenan Stadium.
The game will be broadcast on ESPN2.
This is not the Louisville team that played dominant football in the middle of the 21st century’s opening decade. The Cardinals crushed Carolina during those years. They won 34-0 in Chapel Hill in 2004, and the following year they used that shutout as a foundation to erect a true monument to humiliation: The Cardinals rolled to a 69-14 win on a field named for a pizza-delivery service.
Those games have no bearing on this one, other than serving as a guidebook for a team that says it wants to play football at a higher level than UNC has since Mack Brown left for Texas in 1997. To achieve that goal, Carolina needs to beat Louisville in 2011.
“They lost last week to Marshall, so they have a point to prove,†senior cornerback Charles Brown said. “We can’t have them come out here and prove that point on us.â€
In order to accomplish this goal, the Tar Heels will have to find a way to focus on the present instead of last week’s game in Greenville. Returning to the present probably has not been easy. Odds are that a reasonable number of students have friends attending East Carolina, so the players heard a lot of positive feedback as they strolled around campus this week.
Given what it has been through, this group deserves a pat on the back. Nonetheless, part of being consistently successful in business or athletics means immediately facing one’s errors, even in the midst of success.
Teams move forward, or, by default, slide backward. No team stops time.
“We talk about eliminating the noise,†Withers said. “Everybody is going to pat them on the back this week for beating ECU. Everybody is going to tell you how good you were. Well, you’re only as good as that next game you play.
“This team is going to come in and fight and scratch,†Withers said.
Louisville is 2-2, with victories against Murray State (21-9) and archrival Kentucky (24-17). The losses came to Florida International University (24-17) and Marshall (17-13).
“We have a lot of good things going on,†Withers said, but, “we could even be better. When you’re searching for perfection, you want to try to get some excellence on the way. That is what we’re trying to do.â€
To do so this week, Withers said the Tar Heels will need to force turnovers again, but this time turn a greater percentage into touchdowns for Carolina.
“I showed a film to our team,†Withers said. “We called it ‘Meat on the Bone.’ We left a lot of meat on the bone. On special teams, we have two kickoffs where if we get one block, we’re to the house. A block on offense – if somebody makes one block, [Giovani Bernard] has 240-something yards rushing. We showed all those things, thinking the score could have been 50-something.
“In the rest of this schedule, we have to start taking advantage of those opportunities,†Withers said.