North Carolina Central’s visit to Kenan Stadium this weekend will mark UNC’s annual contest with an Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) team.
In the era of separate subdivisions in college football, the Tar Heels usually play one game per season against the FCS. Any more than that will draw deriding cries of a “cupcake” schedule.
That’s because, for most respectable programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), FCS games are as close to an automatic win as you’ll find.
Even some of the worst Carolina teams in recent memory had no trouble in their FCS bouts: the 2017 Tar Heels finished 3-9, yet still smoked FCS Western Carolina 65-10. In 2018, UNC was 2-9, but rolled over Western again by a 49-26 score.
Chapel Hill was just two years removed from the departure of two campus cornerstones: men’s basketball head coach Dean Smith and athletic director John Swofford.
Smith had announced his retirement just weeks before the start of the 1997-98 season, paving the way for longtime assistant Bill Guthridge. This came just a few months after Swofford departed to become commissioner of the ACC.
“It was pretty turbulent,” said Chapelboro’s Art Chansky. “It was not what we were used to with Carolina athletics.”
On the football field, the Tar Heels were still reeling after losing their own iconic leader. Mack Brown had left for Texas following the end of the 1997 regular season.
And like its men’s basketball counterparts, football had hired from within, promoting defensive coordinator Carl Torbush to the head coaching job. Torbush had led the Tar Heels to a rout in the Gator Bowl on New Year’s Day in 1998, but since then his program was trending down.
The 1998 season opened with three straight losses, including a shocker in the opener to Miami-Ohio in Kenan Stadium. Carolina eventually rallied to qualify for a bowl, but no such hope existed in 1999.
After a 1-1 start, the Tar Heels had dropped five straight games, including a 45-7 dud at a Maryland team which would finish next-to-last in the ACC.
Next up for Carolina was Furman, a perennial contender in what was then known as Division I-AA — later the FCS (the FBS was known as Division I-A). The Paladins were ranked No. 12 in the I-AA poll and on their way to a Southern Conference championship.
Still, surely the Tar Heels would be able to flex their power-conference muscles all over the football field… right?
“Furman scored, and then scored again,” remembered Chansky, who was in attendance that day. “And we were falling into a hole. [This was] at a time when we were not scoring a lot of points. So it looked like we were in trouble right away.”
Indeed, Furman leapt out to a 21-0 lead, only trimmed by a Carolina field goal in the final minute of the first half. The Paladins added one more touchdown for good measure in the fourth quarter. The damage was done, and the result was decisive: 28-3 in favor of the visitors.
“It was funereal,” Chansky said of the atmosphere inside Kenan Stadium.
The final stats paint a grisly picture: Carolina gained just 11 first downs, while the Paladins romped for 461 total yards — nearly 300 of which came on the ground. The Tar Heels completed six passes and finished a meager 3-15 on third-down attempts.
“It was hard to tell,” wrote the News & Observer’s Jeffrey Shelman afterward, “which team allegedly plays Division I-A football.”
After the game, UNC athletic director Dick Baddour admitted the situation with regards to Torbush’s future in Chapel Hill had changed.
The loss to the Paladins seemed to have tipped the scale, and Torbush would last just one more season with Carolina before being replaced by John Bunting.
“You’re not supposed to lose to a team like that in Kenan Stadium,” Chansky said. “Or actually anywhere, if you’re Carolina.”
To the program’s credit, that is exactly what hasn’t happened in the quarter-century since: that day in late October is the last time the Tar Heels have lost to an FCS opponent.
Ironically, one of the closest calls in that period came against Furman, when Carolina eked out a 45-44 victory. The two teams haven’t met since.
North Carolina Central is usually a strong FCS program, though a 41-19 home loss to Elon last weekend suggests the Eagles may be weaker than usual this year.
But if the game stays close longer than is comfortable for the Tar Heel fans in Kenan this Saturday, it’ll be hard not to think about 1999 and the Paladins’ dominance. It was a rough day in a rough year, all wrapped up in a rough era on campus.
“Each Saturday is the same for North Carolina,” Shelman wrote at the time. “There’s a football loss and a lot of wondering.”
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