North Carolina suffered one of the worst losses in the history of its football program on Saturday when the James Madison Dukes walked into Chapel Hill’s Kenan Memorial Stadium and trounced the Tar Heels 70-50.
Yes, that’s a football score, not a basketball one. And what’s more is that UNC wrote JMU a six-figure paycheck for the game.
It was a record-setting beatdown, as the Dukes’ 70 points matched the most ever allowed by the Tar Heels in a game. According to the Associated Press, fans booed the Tar Heels as they walked off the field at halftime.
What the AP story – or any other dispatch from any other reporter covering the game – didn’t contain was a comment from any UNC player. That’s because North Carolina refused to let the assembled media talk to players after this home loss.
embarrassing, bad look for UNC https://t.co/EKWhK2NeKU
— Brooke Pryor (@bepryor) September 21, 2024
The reason for North Carolina doing this can be viewed in a few different ways. One could argue that, perhaps, UNC head coach Mack Brown was either one, trying to shield his players from criticism and take sole responsibility for the loss, or two, send a message to his players that they didn’t earn the right to talk to the media after the game. These are both hypothetical assumptions, because reporters were never given a specific reason why players were not made available other than: “Coach Mack Brown’s comments will serve as the only postgame remarks for the Tar Heels today.”
To Brown’s credit, he did take responsibility for the stunning and ugly defeat:
“It can only come back to one person and that’s me. I’ve hired everybody on this staff and signed every player on this team. I am at fault 100%. I got big shoulders, and I’m embarrassed for our whole program that we would put a product like that on the field.”
Kudos to Brown for shouldering the blame like that.
But here’s the other part of not allowing players at a big-time college football program like UNC to talk to harmless local reporters after they lose at home to a Group of Five opponent: How many times have we heard college coaches talk about how they’re preparing their “student-athletes” for the real world and life after the games? If it is a function of college coaches and administrators to prepare young people for real jobs and real problems, then what is the benefit of shielding them from answering questions for five or 10 minutes after a football game? If higher-ups don’t believe that players can handle that, then haven’t they failed at their jobs?
So, no, we didn’t get to hear from Omarion Hampton about scoring three touchdowns. We didn’t hear from Jacolby Chriswell about throwing for 475 yards. And UNC defenders weren’t given the opportunity to take any sort of accountability.
What would’ve been a good concession is if, instead of players, UNC put defensive coordinator Geoff Collins on the podium instead — but that didn’t happen either.
The football team looked bad on the field. This made it look worse.
It was a day in Chapel Hill where everyone wondered about when basketball season started.
