Heels choke again

So I don't know why I wanted to believe so bad that we had a great football team. Clearly it's only the second year of the Butch Davis era and it's gonna take 3 years before they really turn it around, but after the Rutgers game I thought we'd turned the corner. We looked so good, and then yesterday we came out and were kicking Virginia Tech's butt up and down the field. Yet we get ahead 17-3 and can't close the deal, just like we did years ago at Virginia under Mack Brown.

I'm starting to feel like our whole football program is snakebitten, or tick-bitten. People really believe that by the way. Jim Tatum got hired to be our coach in the 50's after winning a national title at Maryland, during his rebuilding phase he got Rocky Mountain spotted fever and died. That tick is like our version of the curse of the Bambino.


Anyway, I hate to play the spoiled fan who blames the ref game, but the refs really did give that game to Virginia Tech. If you didn't see it, in the fourth quarter they made 3 or 4 calls that were obviously wrong which without any one of them being called, Virginia Tech would have lost. But we should have been up 30 points at that point anyway and it would have been moot. It had a lot to do with the refs but it had a lot to do with choking too.

It's sort of like when we come back and win one when we shouldn't in basketball, that's how it went for Virginia Tech. They're used to winning and we aren't. So they expected to come back at the end and when they started doing it, we seemed to expect it too, and we panicked and helped it to happen.

We have to get to the point where we expect to win if we hope to win the close games against other teams that expect to win.

Maybe we'll learn, we have the talent and the coaching to do it in most cases. (I'm still not sure about the conservative play calling, but we definitely come out prepared)

Anyway, I'm not going to give up yet, if we beat Miami next week, all is not lost on this season. And we still need to beat Notre Dame and State and Duke. We really have to win all those games to have a good season.

Virginia Tech is very fortunate to get out of here with a win. Hopefully we learned something from it. At least they didn't kill us. At least we're out there competing every week now.