Nobody should take any delusions of grandeur from Carolina’s 35-3 win against FCS East Tennessee State Saturday. Last year’s Tar Heels beat FCS Richmond by an even more lopsided score, then promptly finished the year 4-8.
But there is one key difference this year: UNC has already shown it can defeat a team worth its snuff on the national stage (TCU defeated FCS Grambling 63-7 Saturday). With those two wins under their belts heading into a difficult stretch of games, the Tar Heels say they feel confident in what they’ve accomplished so far. For running back Demon June, who scored a career-high three touchdowns Saturday, those accomplishments began well before the opening kickoff.
“I think we all did a good job working hard all week, knowing that we had to take care of business,” June said Saturday. “From tackle to tackle, moving the ball, moving the piles, getting good runs. In the pass game, being efficient, being smart, taking things that were available to us. It helps everybody all around.”
Head coach Bill Belichick was similarly proud of his team’s effort Saturday, praising the work the Tar Heels did in all phases. A late ETSU field goal was the only thing that broke the Carolina defense’s shutout streak which had stretched across more than 100 minutes of game time to that point. The offense hummed right along before a 79-minute weather delay between the third and fourth quarters, with Billy Edwards throwing for two touchdowns to complement June’s hat trick.
Regardless of ETSU’s FCS status, Belichick said Saturday’s win was a step forward for his team as it prepares to head to Death Valley.
“I don’t care what division ETSU is in. They’re well-coached, they have good players,” said Belichick. “They certainly gave us some problems today that we had to adjust to. We had to play hard. It wasn’t anything easy out there today. Give them a lot of credit. Clemson’s Clemson. They’re a good team, too. So we’ll do the best we can to get ready to go and go down there and be ready to go play them.”
Better, more talented Tar Heel teams than this one have gone down to Clemson confident and left with their tails between their legs. Most recently, the star-studded 2023 bunch featuring future pros Drake Maye, Omarion Hampton, Tez Walker and Cedric Gray faced off against an unranked Tiger team and lost 31-20, with a pair of Hampton fumbles at the goal line looming large. UNC’s last win there came in 2001, when some guy named Julius Peppers was on his way to a fruitful pro career of his own.
Peppers was the type of pure physical talent the Tar Heels do not have and have not had for quite some time. But in the first two games at least, the 2026 Carolina defense has more than held its own. The Tar Heels have surrendered a total of 13 points in eight quarters of football, with the lone touchdown coming in the very first quarter of the season. That’s almost two hours without the opponent reaching the end zone.
Relatively unheralded recruits Xavier Lewis and Jaylen Harvey were the defensive stars against ETSU, and transfer linebacker Peyton Seelmann led the team in total tackles and forced a fumble. Seelmann also knows a little something about being overlooked: he began his career in the FCS with Richmond.
Belichick has praised Seelmann as a ‘throwback’ player – quite the honor from the guy who coached Lawrence Taylor. And after Saturday’s win, Seelmann said the Tar Heels as a whole showed themselves to be a throwback team.
“I feel like we showed that we’re tough. We’re physical. We can play,” said Seelmann. “We’ve got all three phases going well… I feel like we’re a blue-collar operation. We play hard. I feel like we do things the right way. And it’s paying off.”
This weekend, the Tar Heels will need all the blue-collar toughness they can get if they want to survive Death Valley for the first time in a quarter-century.
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications/Jeffrey A. Camarati
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