UNC suffered historic loss to ECU Saturday

GREENVILLE — In the 2013 season, when East Carolina dismantled the North Carolina football team 55-31, everyone knew what had gone wrong. The team underestimated the Pirates. They didn’t take them as seriously as they should have.

UNC promised that wouldn’t be the case in a chance at redemption at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium a year later.

But after standing outside the visitor’s locker room Saturday, just moments after a record-breaking 70-41 loss to the Pirates, the collective sense of shock among players and coaches was back. Somehow, the Tar Heels had just allowed a program high in yards (789) and points (70).

But no one seemed to know how. Or why.

Some players said it was a question of heart.

“Effort. Point blank, period,” said redshirt junior wide receiver T.J. Thorpe. “They just - they kicked it to another level with effort.”

Others said that wasn’t the case.

“I mean it’s not effort,” said senior defensive tackle Ethan Farmer. “We gave it all we had, but they were the better team.”

According to Coach Larry Fedora, it wasn’t something that ECU did differently this year.

“They’ve stayed within their scheme,” he said. “They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. They’ve been doing that since they’ve been here.”

The team was picked apart by the same air raid offense that Coach Ruffin McNeill has been using for years. Senior quarterback Shane Carden had no problems getting the Pirates into the end zone, from the first drive — which took all of three plays and 56 seconds — to the last.

“We were outcoached, outplayed, everything,” Fedora said. “And I take full responsibility for it.”

All evening long, the one area of the game where the Tar Heels consistently looked lost was on defense.

Redshirt junior linebacker Jeff Schoettmer didn’t know what specifically the Pirates did to muster 446 passing yards and 343 rushing yards, but he did know it was the defense as a whole. Not one player or position group deserved the blame.

“I mean they beat us on some long plays — some long passes and some long runs,” he said. “That’s not one part of the defense, the secondary, or the linebackers or the D-line. That’s everyone together, you know? So you can’t point fingers. It’s the defense as a whole.

“We messed up.”

Fedora said it had a lot to do with the fact that UNC couldn’t stop the run — notably senior running back Breon Allen, who ran for a career-high 211 yards.

“If you don’t stop the run, you allow them to be two-dimensional,” Fedora said. “It makes it really tough, and that’s what we did tonight.”

For the second year in a row, the Tar Heels didn’t have an answer for what East Carolina brought onto the field. That has left players and coaches wondering what went wrong, trying to figure out how to put it behind them and move on.

“It makes you reevaluate everything,” Fedora said. “It makes you reevaluate who you are, who I am and who we are as a football team.

“We’ll find out a lot about who we are, we really will.”

sports@dailytarheel.com