In each of the last two weekends, the No. 17 North Carolina football team has found itself in impossibly tough situations against great opponents.
Against Pittsburgh on Sept. 24, the Tar Heels were down 36-30 and needed a touchdown to win with just under four minutes on the clock.
And on Saturday in Tallahassee, the situation was even more daunting. With 23 seconds left, North Carolina had the ball on its own 25-yard line with two timeouts and needed a field goal to beat then-No. 12 Florida State.
The odds were stacked against them, the pressure enormous. But both times, somehow, the Tar Heels delivered. Led by a stoic but strong leader in Mitch Trubisky, the Tar Heels marched down the field and won both games to improve to 4-1 (2-0 ACC) on the season.
In the tense late-game situations, many teams would succumb to pressure and start to crack. But that hasn’t been the case with UNC. Coach Larry Fedora said the team prepares each week and over the offseason for moments exactly like these. And when the tense moments do come, the practiced repetition calms the nerves and the pressure.
“We really didn’t panic,” Trubisky said of the team’s final drive against Florida State, when the Tar Heels drove 38 yards and kicked a 54-yard field goal to secure the 37-35 win.
“We just said, ‘We are going to do what we do. We are going to get two or three plays and we’ve just got to make it happen.’ And we did.”
Fedora emphasized that many of the plays the team made were just ordinary plays — pitches and catches that the team has run thousands of times in practice.
“If you go back to that drive in the Pitt game, how many of those plays were extraordinary?” Fedora said. “I mean, think about it. It was just throwing and catching. It’s what they do.”
