Monday Morning Hot Takes: North Carolina

Well that sucked. The Deacs threw away a lead in the 4th quarter for the second year in a row against the North Carolina Tar Heels and lost their first game of the season 55-58. The Deacs are still undefeated in the ACC, so they control their own destiny in making it to the ACC Championship Game. It seems that many of you have got the overreacting under control, so some of these takes might seem pretty tame. I’ll do my best. Please keep in mind that these are just the opinions of a fan who doesn’t really know that much about the sport of football and likes to complain.

The defense played well enough to win that game. It seems like a lot of people are absolutely going scorched earth on the defense, and I get that—they did give up 546 yards and 58 points. Whenever the Deacs lose or have a bad game, the fan base goes into this blame game where we say the defense is nonexistent and lost Wake the game or the offense disappeared and they were the reason Wake lost. It turns out, it’s all one team. The offense plays super fast, which affects the defense. When the offense is scoring touchdowns, it doesn’t matter, everyone is happy. When they aren’t, bad things happen, especially at the end of the game when the defense is exhausted. In the 4th quarter of Saturday’s game (when it mattered), the Wake Forest offense had drives that totaled 0:42, 2:31, and 0:50—all ending with 0 points. One of those was an interception deep in our own territory. The defense gave up 24 points in that time span. Both of these things are not good. In my mind, because the offense is so much better than the defense, they get the responsibility of greater expectations. That’s not fair, but the defense is what the defense is at this point. The defense started the game with a fumble recovery. They got stops on 8 of 16 third downs. UNC punted 4 times—that’s more than the games against Army and UVA and the same number as Louisville and Florida State. The defense is struggling, but this was not a drastically different performance than what we have seen all year.

Everyone remain calm. This is the exact opposite of a hot take, but let’s calm down for a second. I know the way the Deacs lost was excruciating and I know that everyone really hates losing to UNC more than any other team in the nation. But we’re still 8-1 and 5-0 in the conference. The season is not over because the Deacs lost one game. Losing sucks but we still have a chance to win the ACC.

I don’t mind going for it on 4th down. Maybe it was the wrong call, but, Wake’s team is built on the offense and the secondary was down to the 3rd string. I’d much rather put the game in the hands of the offense than the defense. The play call could have been a little better, but even in hindsight, whether Wake gets the ball back tied or down 3, a touchdown still wins the game.

Anything less than 10 wins this season would be a massive failure. I don’t care about preseason predictions, or how we would have felt at the beginning of the season if someone said we’d finish 9-3 or any of that. Expectations change based on the situation. If you start 8-0, anything less than 10-2 becomes a disappointment.

After the loss, I didn’t really feel like paying attention to the rest of the college football slate, so I’ve got nothing else to add. There are some of my takes from week 10 of college football. Feel free to drop some of yours in the comments.