An unusually comfortable conclusion to the end of UNC football’s new beginning
Sam Howell’s bag of fourth-quarter tricks sat somewhere on the sideline, unneeded and unused. The trickery came in the third quarter to extend an already large North Carolina lead, when Howell, having already thrown for a record amount of touchdowns and run for one this season, caught one as well.
Why not?
After closing out the regular season with a blowout win at N.C. State, North Carolina again left the drama at home in the postseason. At the end of a season that saw nine of the Tar Heels’ games decided by a single possession, Friday’s 55-13 thumping of Temple in the Military Bowl put them on the right side of .500 and added an exclamation point to Mack Brown’s first season back in Chapel Hill.
It’s not at all hard to imagine the grand experiment that is Brown’s return going better than this, given the narrow misses and close shaves, so many of them, but it would have been both unfair and unrealistic to expect any more.
“We weren’t ready to win those games early in the year,” Brown said. “We’re ready to win those games now.”
North Carolina will finish the first year of the second Mack era with a winning record and a bowl win, maybe not the bowl the Tar Heels might have hoped for in the giddy aftermath of the season-opening win over South Carolina, but still a bowl and still a win. The ground covered this fall far exceeds the 7-6 record, from the wins over Duke and N.C. State to the inroads on the recruiting trail to the posteriors in long-empty seats at Kenan Stadium.
Brown deserves, and will receive, a tremendous degree of credit for all of that, for putting a shaky program on assuredly solid footing, even if there’s always more than one person who deserves to share it. In this case, in that wide group, there’s one additional person who played as important a role as Brown.
No single act of Brown’s was more vital to the future of the program than convincing Howell to stay home, his first priority after taking the job, and for good reason. The immediate success of this entire project hinged on the ability to solve the vexing question at quarterback, and Howell was not only the closest answer but the right one.
The road to Friday’s win, and the future of the North Carolina program, ran through Indian Trail. Once Brown got Howell aboard, anything and everything was possible.
“Obviously, he’s the first guy you go see when you take the job,” Brown said. “You get to Charlotte as fast as you can, because you know how good he can be.”
Howell wasn’t the only thing that went right for the Tar Heels this season. But his presence opened the door for the rest of it.
His gunslinging performance Friday was among his finest, without the late-game heroics but with the help of his receivers. Dyami Brown outfought a Temple defender in the end zone at the end of a 39-yard Howell heave for North Carolina’s first touchdown, and Dazz Newsome had three acrobatic, tip-toeing catches at the edges of the end zone, even if only two of them actually counted.
“How about those receivers?” Howell marveled, as both Brown and Newsome cleared 1,000 yards for the season.
Howell even scrambled for 53 yards, turning what little pressure Temple was able to muster against the Owls, then caught the Tar Heels’ fifth touchdown of the day from Rontavius Groves on a reverse pass.
Already the all-time single-season leader in touchdown passes by a true freshman, Howell continued to work his way up the ACC’s overall list, passing Tajh Boyd. Only Jameis Winston (40) and Deshaun Watson (41) have ever thrown more than Howell’s 38 this year, and both of them played for national champions. Lamar Jackson never threw this many, nor Philip Rivers or Matt Ryan.
For both Howell and the Tar Heels, it was an unusually comfortable conclusion to a season that began with a come-from-behind victory, one that will only raise the already high expectations for next season into the stratosphere.
“It’s fun, and now these guys coming back have something to build on,” Brown said. “Seven’s not enough anymore.”
For this group, Friday was just the end of the beginning. How far the Tar Heels have come in a year. How far they still hope to go yet, in the second season of Brown’s second tenure.
This story was originally published December 27, 2019 at 3:24 PM with the headline "An unusually comfortable conclusion to the end of UNC football’s new beginning."
