T.J. Logan scores game-winning touchdown as UNC beats GT 48-43

A knowing silence took hold of Kenan Stadium. North Carolina’s football partisans saw, for the umpteenth time this season, their team surrender the big one. A 75-yard reverse catapulted Georgia Tech receiver DeAndre Smelter down the far sideline with 3:07 left in Saturday’s conference tilt. The Yellow Jackets wrested the lead from UNC, which had led by 11 early in the fourth quarter and now trailed by one.

Hence the silence. There was some comfort, it seemed, in this most familiar of unpleasant scripts.

But the assembled crowd couldn’t have known what UNC knew. That in this season so devoid of certitude, so empty of something reliable, the Tar Heels would cling, on this night, to the articles of their faith.

They would score. They would win. And they did: 48-43, on a two-yard touchdown run by T.J. Logan with 11 seconds remaining.

“We told the defense as soon as they came off the field, we said, ‘We got your back,’” said quarterback Marquise Williams, who completed a school-record 38 passes for 390 yards and four touchdowns. “‘And we’re gonna go down and score, and we’re gonna do what we need to do.”

“Once they scored, I knew we were going to win the game,” said senior linebacker Jeff Schoettmer, who made three tackles to help UNC end its four-game losing streak and earn its first ACC win of 2014. “I had so much faith in Quise and our offense and how they were playing. I just knew we were going to win the game.”

“To be honest, we knew we were going to get into the end zone,” said sophomore receiver Ryan Switzer, whose career-high 136 receiving yards and two touchdowns featured a second-quarter, 68-yard bomb from Williams. “They just couldn’t stop us tonight. We were in a groove.”

This conviction, perhaps, was misplaced. Georgia Tech (5-2, 2-2 ACC) had long flogged UNC (3-4, 1-2 ACC) with its bamboozling offense. While leading a pre-game walkthrough with UNC’s defense Saturday, linebackers coach Ron West made an unfulfilled request. “Stand up if you’ve beaten Georgia Tech,” he said. No one could. Before Saturday, no UNC team had won against Georgia Tech since 2008. Five straight losses. Five straight years of triple-option torment.

The pain endured Saturday, to some extent. UNC’s defense, which allows, on average, the second-most points in the nation, surrendered 43 points, 376 rushing yards and 611 total yards. It yielded on five of eight third-down opportunities. The secondary authored a pair of misadventures: one by safety Sam Smiley on a misjudged ball that gave Darren Waller a 55-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Justin Thomas, the other by a disoriented Dominique Green, who allowed Smelter to slip free for a 46-yard touchdown grab.

But there was Williams, able to outpace the Yellow Jackets. UNC countered with 579 yards of total offense. A once battered offensive line had its five starters on the field for the second straight week. Williams spent Saturday night in a cocoon, throwing at his leisure and rushing when prudent. He ran for 73 yards and, with a 13-yard touchdown scamper in the third quarter, tied Ronald Curry’s school record for most career rushing touchdowns by a quarterback (13).

“He’s balled the last couple of weeks,” Switzer said of Williams. “He’s done his part. And tonight, he got some help.”

It came in the form of a dedicated running attack, buoyed by the fortified offensive line. Logan gained 75 yards, Romar Morris 43. Quick bursts through the middle and to the outside strengthened a ceaseless air assault, save a first-quarter pick by Williams.

It came in the form of Mack Hollins, the walk-on-turned-standout wide receiver, who unfurled his tentacles for arms to snare a fourth-and-seven touchdown pass from Williams early in the fourth quarter that stretched UNC’s lead to 42-31.

And, when Smelter’s reverse flipped the scoreboard in Ga. Tech’s favor, it came in the form of singular conviction — that the chokehold UNC had on the Yellow Jackets’ offense would remain.

“It was so much a blessing,” Williams said of the 3:07 left on the clock after Smelter’s go-ahead score. “My heart just dropped as soon as this guy was running down the field. I was like, ‘Please, lord, just help me.’ And it felt great. I’m glad they gave me three minutes.”

“We had three timeouts with three minutes,” Switzer said. “That was cake for us.”

Williams had it, and ate it too. He had, just days before, trumped UNC’s defense in a two-minute drill, a weekly exercise for the team. He picked apart Ga. Tech with the ease of a veteran surgeon. He spurned high-risk options for surefire check-downs, each of his six passes gaining no more than 15 yards. Two Ga. Tech penalties later, Logan poked through the end zone.

Is this the anatomy of a turnaround? A chest-thumping, heart-racing affair that breathes life into a team burdened by self-doubt?

Perhaps. UNC was fractured, too, a year ago, a 1-5 team mired in a four-game losing spell, sitting on the precipice of irrelevance. Then, in its seventh game, a win at home against a conference foe, Boston College, sparked a five-game winning streak that salvaged their season and delivered them to the Belk Bowl.

A week ago, UNC sat in South Bend nearly broken, their “guts ripped out,” Fedora said, by a would-have-could-have-should-have, 50-43 loss to then-No. 5 Notre Dame. The Tar Heels losing streak had reached four straight, their season teetering, for another year, on their seventh game, an ACC affair in Chapel Hill.

“It was huge,” Schoettmer said of Saturday’s win. “Absolutely huge. I think it’s the turning point to our season, really. Now we get the ball rolling, we get an ACC victory. It feels great.”

“It was huge,” Fedora said. “It was huge. We needed this more than anything right now.”

And yet, the blemishes, the pangs of self-doubt, remain.

“I’ll be honest with you: I’m still concerned about the offense, the defense and special teams,” Fedora said.

“I’ve got a lot of things to worry about.”

But for one night, angst surrendered to autumnal bliss. When Logan reached the end zone, he opened his arms and stretched them skyward, as if thanking the heavens for bestowing, for a change, some good fortune upon his team.

The crowd roared. The stadium shimmied. And the UNC sideline leapt as if it had just discovered its legs.

There would be no silence by night’s end. Only the raucous hope of what still could be lingered in the cool air.

sports@dailytarheel.com