ACL surgery in September. Not sure of the recovery time.
We scored 11 TDs in those games by my quick count. He threw for 6 and ran for 2. Percentage was actually 68 percent. It is not a worthless stat because it moves the chains. All that said, I think we need to get a playmaker for QB. We also need a running game. Gio had bad OC, bad OL, anemic running game and apparently was injured for the FH of the season. I just think the kid has been scapegoated way beyond his fair share of the blame.
He isn’t responsible for a lot of what went wrong this year. But, at the same time, he isn’t part of the solution, either. Our schedule next year is brutal, particularly in comparison to what we just played. We had the 105th hardest schedule this year, just behind the Rice Owls. And our offense was positively anemic. I don’t see Gio as being successful against what we will face next year. We will need a massive overhaul of our offense just to be competitive in most of our games. That starts with the QB, the offensive line, and the running game.
Agree with all that.
HS recruits are lapping it up. Hopefully portal guys will.
They're primarily lapping up Benjamins (not that there is anything wrong with that. Get paid, young men).
Completely agree. Every single other P4 or G5 college football coach in the country goes to a bowl game with this schedule *at an absolute miniumum*. Every single solitary one of them. Hell, I'd even go as far as to say every single other **Carolina Football** coach in our modern history gets us to a bowl game against this schedule. Every one of them. Name 'em- Mack Brown (both 2.0 and 1.0 versions), Larry Fedora, Everett Withers, Butch Davis, John Bunting, Dick Crum.
Yes .... You can stack the box against a bad QB because they aren't going to beat you passing.
It's an interesting point and one that I do not think you are wrong about. Any other coach in my lifetime would have found a way to back into 6 wins against this schedule.
If you have a scholarship offer to be coached by the guy who is the most accomplished and the second winningest coach in NFL history, and getting to the NFL is your goal, it's very, very easy to understand how 17- and 18-year-old kids and their families are enamored by the 8 Super Bowl rings and the "NFL's 33rd team" facade. I totally get it. The problem is, the Bill Belichick that is coaching them now is not the Bill Belichick of 2005 or 2015 or even 2020. *That* Bill Belichick is clearly long gone and buried somewhere. The one that exists now is a hollowed-out husk and shell of his former self. But those 8 Super Bowl rings don't shine any less bright, and to 17-year old high school recruits, it's pretty easy to see how they could want to sign up for it.
Totally. John Bunting, who has the worst tenure of any UNC football coach in my lifetime, probably breezes to a bowl game with this team against this schedule. We had quite literally the toughest schedule in the country in 2004- #15 Virginia, #20 Louisville, #9 Florida State, #11 Utah, #4 Miami, #16 Virginia Tech- and went 6-5 and got to a bowl game. The very next year, he almost did it again- we played #17 Georgia Tech, #19 Louisville, #23 Virginia, #6 Miami, #21 Boston College, and #5 Virginia Tech- and we went 5-6, and had a 10-point fourth quarter lead at home against Maryland that we gagged away.
Indeed. We can bring in great recruits, but will the coaching staff be able or willing to use them properly? We played an easy schedule this year and finished 4-8, and our 4 wins were against UNCC (which finished 1-11), Richmond (FBS school), Stanford (a bad team), and Syracuse, maybe the worst P4 team in the country. And our 8 losses were not exactly against a murderer's row of powerhouses, especially our in-state rivals.
Precisely. It's why I've gotten such a huge kick out of the folks on IC who keep touting our recruiting class like it's somehow some sort of proof positive guarantee that we're going to magically win 8, 9, 10 games next year. It's like......you know that the same guys who did such a miserable job of assembling *this* roster and coaching *this* team are going to be assembling the roster and coaching next year's team, too, right? People think because we have a handful of 4-star recruits and a handful of 3-star guys who flipped from or had offers from other major programs that it inherently means that we're going to see some magical turnaround. We won't, because the problem isn't the players. The problem resides with the guy who leads the people who are supposed to coach them, teach them, mentor them, develop them, game plan for them, scheme for them, effectively manage the game for them, and teach them discipline, are failing miserably on every single one of those counts. Those things aren't going to change, because Bill Belichick isn't going to change.
