Opening statement
Obviously, a heck of a football game. I give a lot of credit to Duke. It's a good football team. They're well coached, and they battled hard, and fortunately we were able to make a couple more plays than they did, but really happy for our team. They worked extremely hard, especially our seniors. It meant a lot to them to ring the bell. And so happy for them and proud of them. We had a couple great drives early and had a good one in the third quarter, good one in the fourth quarter. Unfortunately, we turned the ball over three times on fumbles, so we got to do a better job of taking care of that. But defensively, a good effort in the red area. Kept them out of the end zone a number of times. And those guys just fight hard down there and don't give up on those final yards.
And that's really been helpful for us all year. So hopefully we can continue to keep that going. But we got a couple guys banged up during the game, so did they when it's a physical tough game as you would expect with these two teams. And like I said, proud of the team and just happy to come out of here with a win. But I though our guys earned it and just have to reload and fill the tank back up and be ready for Syracuse.
On red zone defense
Yeah. Well, I mean they're tough. They got a great running back. And so certainly tackling him is a problem, but they bring a hand in there, and they had some tough passes down there. They caught us on that one. Crossing pick pattern; they tried some other ones, but they have a good scheme down there. They're well coached, and they present a lot of problems that luckily we were able to get enough guys around the ball and keep them from getting in. It wasn't easy.
Walk us through the thought process of the fourth-down call in that final drive, and then kind of catapulted y'all down the rest of that drive.
Yeah, I wasn't punting again. It hadn't gone well for us. And so unless it was like fourth and third or something, but I didn't want to give the ball back and thought we'd go down with take our best shot. And we hit a lot of quick timing passes and I thought that Billy did a good job of distributing the ball. It's a battle. They're a good pass rushing team. It was a battle to keep him off the quarterback. I thought he did a really good job of stepping up in the pocket and kind of taking the ends out of the rush and our tackles were able to ride them by, but I mean it wasn't easy. But yeah, I wasn't going to punt that last series.
Two straight road wins in the conference, two games late where you guys made plays. Is there something about the character of this team or something about the execution that's maybe allowing you guys to win these games late and make the plays down the stretch?
That's character. I mean, these guys battled all the way, battled all the way against Notre Dame too. Thompson. We've been fighting all the way, so I don't have any questions about their competitiveness, character, toughness. There's obviously some things that we need to keep doing better, but competition part of it's been pretty good.
On impact and importance of beating Duke
I don't know. I mean that's not really for me to judge. I would just say that these guys compete hard every week. It was a joke about what I said. I mean, I heard that from my parents and all, but I mean honestly, I have a ton of respect for Duke, the university, the football program, the basketball program and really everything. So it's nothing personal with them. I mean, I respect them. Of course, they're a big rival. We want to beat them and they feel the same way about us. But we'll let the season go and play out here. We got 12 games, and this is one of them, and it's a big one. It's a great win. There's a lot of other ones, a bunch of them afterwards and we already played a lot of tough games. So we'll evaluate the season when we get to the end.
But certainly it's good to come in here and beat a good football team, defending champs, and they deserve to be. So we're proud to win, but we understand we got a lot of work to do going forward.
This article originally appeared on Duke Wire: Everything UNC head coach Bill Belichick said after beating Duke