Five straight and eight of the last eleven.
North Carolina has been a house of horrors for us, and we cannot afford to fall victim to another one.
The game nobody forgets is 2020. We'd just blown out Duke, we were 8-1 and in the top ten and Steve Kim admitted he started to believe Manny Diaz had it turned around. Then UNC ran for 554 yards and six touchdowns at 10.1 a carry.
Michael Carter and Javonte Williams went up and down Hard Rock like it was a walkthrough. Steve still remembers penalties pushing them back to a first-and-33, then a routine handoff picking up 28. He calls it the worst defensive performance he's seen from Miami.
That game was also the bill coming due on bad defensive recruiting and a team that wasn't locked in from the head coach down. I never thought Manny was a bad coordinator. As a head coach, his defenses got worse because he didn't recruit well and wasn't a top-down culture setter.
That night was the beginning of the end. We lost the bowl game, D'Eriq King got hurt, and Alabama blew us off the field the next fall. It all traces back to that game.
So why is this time different? The standard.
Our best player never complains and is the hardest worker in the building, and that sets the tone for everybody else.
Steve told a story from Quadtrine Hill, our old fullback, who spent an offseason in New England the year Randy Moss arrived. At a spring minicamp, Tom Brady threw a bad ball and Bill Belichick ripped him in front of everybody. Moss turned to the veterans and asked if that really just happened to Brady. Every day, they told him. Brady takes it first. Moss figured out right there that his act wasn't going to fly.
Malachi Toney is Brady in that story. Mensah threw him a ball this year that got him lit up, and Toney didn't say a word about being put in harm's way. He said he should have caught it. When your best player talks like that, nobody else gets to make excuses. The standard comes from inside the building.
None of that guarantees anything Saturday. It's Halloween weekend, it's Belichick, and Notre Dame is sitting right on the horizon. Plenty about this one feels spooky before anybody touches the ball, but history doesn't tackle.
This isn't the 2020 team, and it isn't coached like one. Win the line of scrimmage, play to our own standard, and the curse becomes a trivia question.
We went deep on the 2020 disaster and a lot more on the full show below:
North Carolina has been a house of horrors for us, and we cannot afford to fall victim to another one.
The game nobody forgets is 2020. We'd just blown out Duke, we were 8-1 and in the top ten and Steve Kim admitted he started to believe Manny Diaz had it turned around. Then UNC ran for 554 yards and six touchdowns at 10.1 a carry.
Michael Carter and Javonte Williams went up and down Hard Rock like it was a walkthrough. Steve still remembers penalties pushing them back to a first-and-33, then a routine handoff picking up 28. He calls it the worst defensive performance he's seen from Miami.
That game was also the bill coming due on bad defensive recruiting and a team that wasn't locked in from the head coach down. I never thought Manny was a bad coordinator. As a head coach, his defenses got worse because he didn't recruit well and wasn't a top-down culture setter.
That night was the beginning of the end. We lost the bowl game, D'Eriq King got hurt, and Alabama blew us off the field the next fall. It all traces back to that game.
So why is this time different? The standard.
Our best player never complains and is the hardest worker in the building, and that sets the tone for everybody else.
Steve told a story from Quadtrine Hill, our old fullback, who spent an offseason in New England the year Randy Moss arrived. At a spring minicamp, Tom Brady threw a bad ball and Bill Belichick ripped him in front of everybody. Moss turned to the veterans and asked if that really just happened to Brady. Every day, they told him. Brady takes it first. Moss figured out right there that his act wasn't going to fly.
Malachi Toney is Brady in that story. Mensah threw him a ball this year that got him lit up, and Toney didn't say a word about being put in harm's way. He said he should have caught it. When your best player talks like that, nobody else gets to make excuses. The standard comes from inside the building.
None of that guarantees anything Saturday. It's Halloween weekend, it's Belichick, and Notre Dame is sitting right on the horizon. Plenty about this one feels spooky before anybody touches the ball, but history doesn't tackle.
This isn't the 2020 team, and it isn't coached like one. Win the line of scrimmage, play to our own standard, and the curse becomes a trivia question.
We went deep on the 2020 disaster and a lot more on the full show below:
