UNC wants to avoid going for Virginia Tech’s ‘cheese’

By Bill Cole
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
Published: September 18, 2008

CHAPEL HILL - One stretch of futility at North Carolina is over, but another runs deeper and longer.

UNC will begin its pursuit of the ACC title on Saturday when Virginia Tech visits Kenan Stadium for a 3:30 p.m. game. UNC last won the title in 1980 but this season’s team is trying to end the drought, the longest time that the program has gone without an ACC title since the conference was founded in 1953.

The game against the defending ACC champion will be demanding, according to Kendric Burney, a sophomore cornerback.

“It’s step one of getting to Tampa,” Burney said of the city that will play host to the ACC title game in December. “We’ve got a sign down there (in the locker room) that says, ‘680 miles to Tampa, Fla.’ We’re getting in the car and it’s time to go.”

UNC is 2-0 for the first time since 2000 after beating Rutgers 44-12 in Piscataway, N.J., Thursday. The win snapped a 20-game losing streak in road games outside the state.

Hakeem Nicks, a junior receiver, said that the players forgot about Rutgers over the weekend and are thinking now about beating Virginia Tech for the first time since the school was admitted to the ACC in 2004.

“Our confidence level is high right now, but at the same time we want to continue to stay humble,” Nicks said. “We want to keep practicing like we practiced last week. We want to keep up the momentum and keep the intensity going.”

Coach Butch Davis of UNC was in the second year of a five-year stay at Oklahoma State as an assistant when UNC last won the ACC title. Davis has deep admiration for Virginia Tech from his time at Miami in the late 1990s, when both schools played in the Big East Conference and he spent long hours in his office trying to devise ways to stop Michael Vick.

Davis disagrees with Nicks on one point: maintaining last week’s practice level is not going to be good enough for UNC to beat Virginia Tech.

“The only way that I know as a coach that you can ever expect to play well on Saturday is to prepare well,” Davis said. “If you don’t prepare well you have no right to expect to win. You can’t put it on auto-pilot. Each week it’s got to be more.”

The outcome for UNC could hinge on an aspect of defensive play that Davis calls “not biting the cheese.”

Davis doesn’t want his defense attacking the first move of a play because of Tech’s Tyrod Taylor, the starting quarterback. Taylor is quick and shifty, and Davis knows from his time battling against Vick that Virginia Tech’s plays can appear to be one design and suddenly will become something different.

The defense must be patient, Davis said, if it hopes to keep Taylor and Virginia Tech under control.

“We’ll probably say ‘discipline’ 150 times this week to the players. Just talking about making sure that you’re in the right place,” Davis said.

Burney said that he laughed slightly when he first heard the “cheese” reference earlier in his UNC career. He said that he did not know what Davis and the defensive coaches meant at the time.

“It means when you see something shallow, don’t jump because there’s definitely something coming behind you,” Burney said. “It’s hard to not jump the cheese when something is that good, but you’ve got to stay back.

“If the cornerbacks jump the cheese, we leave our safeties by themselves, and that’s something we definitely don’t want. We seem to be saying it a lot here recently because we jumped a lot of stuff against Rutgers.”