Yep, Ron Burgundy pretty much says it all. Carolina walked into the Georgia Dome last night with a fan base fully prepared to receive a clubbing from a perennial SEC contender, and looked the part through two quarters, falling into a 20-point deficit going into halftime. Then somehow the Heels managed to resurrect their hopes of an upset in the fourth quarter with two huge scoring drives and a miracle fumble recovery, only to eventually fall just... six... yards... short. What do we take away from this game? And can we give analysis in a blatant Bill Simmons ripoff style that ties in various other quotes from Anchorman? Oh, we're going there. (If this annoys you, blame my friend Luke Meadows, who put up a post on Facebook minutes after LSU rattled off 23 points in six minutes that just said "Boy, that escalated quickly... I mean, that really got out of hand fast." Couldn't get Anchorman out of my head the rest of the night). 

"I don't know how to put this but I'm king of a big deal" - This one very clearly goes to T.J. Yates, who deserves first mention over absolutely anything else that a UNC fan could say about this game. The much-maligned quarterback has been openly booed by a fan base that could hardly wait to put him out to pasture in favor of Brynn Renner coming into the season, and was facing an SEC defense without his top two rushers and #1 receiver, yet managed to put the team on his back when they needed him most, throwing for 412 yards, 3 TDs and no interceptions. Even in the final drive you couldn't ask for anything more from Yates, as he twice gave Carolina a chance to win with catchable throws to Zack Pianalto that you could argue should have been caught, should have been pass interference, or some combination of the two.

"My God, what is that smell?... It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!" - Conversely, we must switch immediately to topic number two in conversations among Carolina fans, which has to be the horrific special teams play by the Tar Heels. The numbers can pretty much speak for themselves (326 total return yards allowed, 218 yards allowed to Patrick Peterson in the first half which included an 87-yard punt return for a TD, and of course there's the illuminating stat of Casey Barth having to make 3 tackles) but as gaudy as those numbers are they don't even capture the horror of watching it happen on TV. I realize that unit was hit harder than most people realized by the academic suspensions, but had it not been for the (controversial) onside kick recovery at the end of the game, this unit would have been nearly irredeemable, something you felt like the coaching staff didn't figure out until midway through the third quarter. Speaking of which:

[jumping into the Kodiak bear pit at the San Diego Zoo]: "I immediately regret this decision." - Surely this was how Butch Davis and company must have felt after continually deciding to kick to Peterson in the first half and continually being burned. I'm not the type of fan that thinks he knows more than a coaching staff but some things are just painfully obvious, like the fact that the Heels should have started punting out of bounds much earlier than they did - the yardage LSU earned on special teams was one of several things you can point to that could have swung the game in Carolina's favor. As much as UNC's staff has to be commended for getting UNC to come back the way they did, it's unclear whether they earned that level of praise with their playcalling and motivational skills or if they were being helped out a bit by some of the awful coaching coming from the other sideline; even with a win under his belt, Les Miles managed to come out of that game with his seat getting noticeably hotter.

"I will smash your face into a car windshield, and then take your mother, Dorothy Mantooth, out for a nice seafood dinner and never call her again." - This one gets a shoutout because that's pretty much how LSU's defensive line treated the Tar Heels' O-line all game. Expected to be one of the more solid units Carolina would still be able to put on the field after suspensions were doled out, it turned out to be one of UNC's most glaring weaknesses. The center-to-QB exchange warrants mentioning for being especially poor and makes Yates' final numbers all the more impressive. You certainly hope the line can show some improvement over the next few games because Carolina is facing a number of good defensive fronts in the ACC and right now teams like Virginia Tech and Florida State were probably licking their chops watching this game.

Brick... You should find yourself a safehouse or a relative close by. Lay low for a while, because you're probably wanted for murder. - To all the UNC suspended players who still traveled to the Georgia Dome - WHY???? It's nice to come and support your team and all but when you're being questioned regarding how you obtained funds to travel to various places around the United States, it just doesn't look good to show up in the crowd at a place six hours away from where you go to school. And if the administration knew about this and/or encouraged it, they should be given a nice punch to the ovary - right in the babymaker. To a nation of college football fans well aware of UNC's various indiscretions to this point, it just didn't look good.

I know that one day Veronica and I are gonna to get married on top of a mountain, and there's going to be flutes playing and trombones and flowers and garlands of fresh herbs. And we will dance till the sun rises. And then our children will form a family band. And we will tour the countryside and you won't be invited. - Finally, I feel like this quote warrants being here because somehow, this is how Carolina's fan base managed to come away from this game feeling. There seems to be a collective feeling that UNC lost the battle but won the war in terms of not embarrassing themselves on a national stage and performing so admirably despite major personnel losses. The word I've probably seen most on Facebook updates, message boards and blog comments is "proud", as in, "I am so proud of this team and the way they played." And while I am glad that Carolina played admirably, I am retaining a not-yet-rosy feeling about the future. Within 15 minutes of Ron Burgundy making the above statement, he was already referring to the same woman as a smelly pirate hooker - that's the kind of 180 I'm fearing from UNC's fan base. Carolina managed to catch quite a few breaks in this game and came up a little short - if there's one thing you can't count on week to week it's luck. Also, everyone seems to be ready to invite UNC's list of suspended players back onto the field but multiple investigations remain unresolved and the Heels can't be sure who will and who won't be returning, or at the very least missing more games.

I'm also a little uneasy cheering for moral victories, as ultimately they still get filed in the "loss" column. Carolina fans have adopted this same upbeat attitude after a good showing in their last two bowl games (both hard-fought losses) and a number of close regular season games (Butch Davis continues to have a terrible record at UNC in games decided by a touchdown or less) but at some point this program has to get over the hump in terms of living up to or surpassing expectations over the course of a season, not just this one game. Hopefully Carolina can deliver this same kind of performance throughout the year and change their fortunes by piling up the wins. If all this team can do is keep it close and the losses continue to mount, I'm not sure we'll all be so forgiving.

What? You pooped in the refrigerator? And you ate the whole... wheel of cheese? How'd you do that? Heck, I'm not even mad; that's amazing. - Ultimately, this is the takeaway from the Heels' slightly-disappointing loss to LSU. Yes, the program shamed itself a bit with the multiple investigations currently being conducted, but the players who were allowed to take the field exonerated themselves nicely, giving a valiant effort. Yes, there's some figurative poop in the fridge to deal with later, but for the time being we just can't get over being impressed; here's hoping it's a feeling that continues all season.

You stay classy, Tar Heels.

Finally, after all the waiting it appears BusWatch 2010 has yielded the worst-case scenario everyone was dreading: six Carolina players have been ruled ineligible for the game against LSU this weekend, six more are being held out pending a conclusion of the investigation, and three more have their eligibility possibly in question. To the official press release!

The six ineligible student-athletes include: defensive tackle Marvin Austin, cornerback Charles Brown, cornerback Kendric Burney, wide receiver Greg Little, defensive end Michael McAdoo and defensive end Robert Quinn.

Six other student-athletes who will be withheld from Saturday’s game include: tailback Shaun Draughn, defensive end Linwan Euwell, safety Brian Gupton, tailback Ryan Houston, safety Da’Norris Searcy and safety Jonathan Smith.

The number of games that those 12 student-athletes may miss has not been determined at this time. The investigation continues to include both agent-related and academic issues.

The University also continues to work today with the NCAA to determine the eligibility status of three other student-athletes. Those three will not accompany the team to Atlanta on Friday morning. Further information will be announced when a decision on their status for the game is reached.

The big question when this information came out was who those last three mentioned are, and according to Robbi Pickeral at the N&O it appears to be Quan Sturdivant, Bruce Carter and Deunta Williams, which Joe Schad confirmed via twitter - so the Tar Heels could potentially get those three cleared and have them travel in time for the game tomorrow, but after today's news I'm not holding my breath hoping anything good will happen.

To summarize: the Heels are probably going to be short 9 starters on defense (including 6 NFL-level players), its entire starting secondary, their number 1 wideout, and their top 2 runnng backs. So basically, as Schad points out, UNC is basically going to be fielding a "replacement team" against the Tigers on Saturday. Great. I know some people are saying Carolina could rally around this and really surprise someone, but all the gumption in the world can't quite overcome the level of talent they're missing on-field for this game against an SEC opponent in a dome that will probably only be featuring a few specks of blue in the crowd. I'm cheering for an upset to be sure, but I'm anticipating the worst at this point.

At this point, all we can do is laugh about it, because that's a better alternative than crying:

As we sit here waiting to hear some names revealed of just who will and won't ride the bus to Atlanta this weekend for UNC, I finally took a few moments to read the Bomani Jones article on ESPN that was making the rounds earlier this week, where he basically takes the system to task for its treatment of academics among athletes:

If you’re looking beneath the surface for the problem in Chapel Hill, you might find it in the amazing coincidence that so many top-notch athletes are so interested in how humans relay messages. Or maybe it’s just that “communications” fits the bill for what a former UNC football player told me about the majors of choice there: Athletes are interested in a major that works around their busy schedules, requires little math, primarily assigns short papers and uses subjective grading in most of its courses.

That common thread among so many of UNC’s best players reflects a problem particular to athletics. It isn’t limited to Chapel Hill; nor is it merely an indication of how education has been devalued across the board. Only in athletics are students asked to manage their schoolwork around their real jobs. It’s the only department on campus where limiting the scope of one’s educational possibilities is passed off as a favor. It essentially designates a teenager to be academically irredeemable.

As long as education is used as currency for athletes’ bodies and ungodly amounts of their time, they must at least learn something. Otherwise, they’re being “paid” with rubber checks.

They receive clothes, lodging and the chance to work, a bushel of goods that makes comparisons between college sports and human trafficking unavoidable. Without an enriching educational environment, the current system of college athletics is worse than unfair. It’s inhumane.

Make sure you click through and read the entire thing - Jones certainly makes some salient points, but I also wanted to add just a few thoughts.

I want to certainly start out by mentioning that I think he paints with quite a broad brush - there's a lot of referring to "athletes" and "athletic departments" here which I feel like is a thinly-veiled attempt to hide the fact that for the most part we are talking about revenue sports. During my college experience, both covering and being friends with a lot of athletes, athletes among the non-revenue or Olympic sports were indeed held to  a higher academic standard - which isn't to say I'm condoning Jones' article. If anything, that makes his indictment even more valid in my mind.

The idea that we should challenge our student-athletes in the classroom as much as we do on the field is certainly a noble one, but clearly one that's easier said than done. I agree with Jones' overall thesis that education in the revenue programs is probably more focused more on keeping athletes eligible than really investing in their future intellectually, but it's so much easier to point that fact out than examine all the factors that lead up to that even happening. Maybe a lot of these guys are the first ones in their family to go to college so they have no expectation what it will be like, maybe they haven't even been challenged whatsoever academically in high school, maybe they genuinely don't or won't care even if an effort was really made to expand their intellectual horizons, maybe it doesn't even matter what we care to teach them since often the greatest career benefit you can get from college is the contacts you make there.

The sad truth is that in our increasingly specialized world, there is less and less room for the romantic notion of the polymath; the well-rounded individual who can balance it all. You can't bemoan an athlete for their demanding schedule and subsequent loss of a social life while thinking the pursuits of a first-chair violinist in the university orchestra or a journalism school student who's the editor in chief of the DTH are more noble because they have vaguely academic correlations - the latter two still have the same consequences as the first one. Our world encourages specialization, and your world and your social circle becomes what skill you have chosen to pursue excellence in. There are certainly exceptions, guys like a Myron Rolle who manage to be a starting safety for a D1 program and also earn a Rhodes Scholarship, but those are far and away the outliers.

Jones' article and the situation in general reminded me of a great David Foster Wallace piece I read recently that was published in Esquire in 1995 about the lower rungs of pro tennis called "The String Theory":

Americans revere athletic excellence, competitive success, and it's more than lip service we pay; we vote with our wallets. We'll pay large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we'll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush cliches about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

Maybe Jones is right to question a system that we practice such willful ignorance in celebration of. As someone that currently lives in England I will certainly say that witnessing firsthand the alternative of putting young athletes into training academies at prepubescent ages yields some equally tragic results for them socially and intellectually when they don't make it, so I'm glad that our institutions at the very least make an effort to provide an education for outstanding athletes. And as Tar Heel Fan does an excellent job of pointing out, that's ultimately all we can ask of Carolina, is that they are making an effort. It's not fair to speculate about what priorities or motivations an administration has behind the scenes, we only hope that the education of UNC's student athletes is genuinely important to the people that interact with those same athletes every day. And hopefully one of the best things that comes as a result of this whole debacle is a renewed focus for the University on making sure its athletes are making an effort both on and off the field.

When we last left you, DT Marvin Austin had officially been suspended for violation of team rules. This morning, that list may have bloated into over a dozen more players, as ESPN's Joe Schad is reporting that as many as 16 players could be suspended for the LSU game:

The suspension marks the latest twist during a turbulent summer for North Carolina, which is preparing to play against LSU on Saturday without up to 16 players, sources said Wednesday night.

[...]

Among the players in danger of not traveling with North Carolina Friday are: Austin, Quinn, linebackers Bruce Carter and Quan Sturdivant and cornerbacks Kendric Burney and Charles Brown.

A source said North Carolina may also be depleted at running back on Saturday. The top two running backs for the Tar Heels following spring practice were Shaun Draughn and Ryan Houston. Wide receiver Greg Little has also been questioned about his trips, agents and papers.

Oh, sweet mercy. Here's hoping Schad is setting that number a little high, or Casey Barth may get to fulfill that life-long dream of playing running back in an actual college game. We had heard Houston was possibly having some academic issues after being held out of spring practice but he and Draughn are the newest names to be involved in this list.

However, the news above does clash slightly with the other news coming out of last night's cycle, as Robbi Pickeral of the N&O reported that Dick Baddour was saying some players had been exonorated:

He said the school has been able to clear some football players of wrong-doing, although he would not say how many, again because the investigation is ongoing. He also said that when the school announces who won’t make the Friday trip to Atlanta, it won’t mention the names of the players who have been exonerated.

“We would only mention names of people who were not on the roster,” Baddour said. “We would not mention names of people who had been in review on one side or the other, or cleared. We would only be talking about people who were not going to participate.”

He (Baddour) cautioned that when the school does announce who is – and is not – traveling to this weekend’s game, people should understand that the list “may be fluid. There may be some alterations after we say that, but we’ve got to work towards that. We’re just hoping that we can hold on and be in a position. We want to be able to give the most up-to-date and accurate information, and it’s worth waiting a little longer to do that.”

So, basically, UNC is dragging this on as long as humanly possible, even to the point where we may not even know who is involved or suspended when the travel list for Atlanta is released on Friday morning at 9:30 AM. Here's hoping the news is better than expected, especially when, for example, Robert Quinn has even said publicly that he isn't involved in the investigation but was one of the players cited in Schad's report.

We continue to employ the wait-and-see approach. If you're looking for a little more reading in the meantime, Tar Heel Fan has some good thoughts on the two prongs of the investigation and how communication has differed between the two (scroll to bottom of post).

One reader sent us a note recently asking why we hadn't written anything about the ongoing NCAA and internal investigations involving the UNC football program (by the way, thanks Lloyd, we are getting to it I promise) and the truth is I didn't really want to write anything because nothing had actually happened, per se. UNC held a big conference for the media that was basically just a chance to hear the equivalent of a press release read out loud, and even as the Tar Heels' opening game against LSU crept closer and closer, Carolina has dropped not so much as a hint about what might happen. They have shut down media access to players and coaches, they have refused to release a depth chart for the game, and no punishment has been made public. Until now, that is.

Finally, some resolution: defensive tackle Marvin Austin, a major part of the investigation, has been suspended indefinitely... for violation of team rules. Wait, what??

University of North Carolina head coach Butch Davis has suspended senior defensive tackle Marvin Austin indefinitely.

“This decision is not a result of the ongoing NCAA review,” says Davis. “Marvin has violated team rules and has neglected his responsibilities to the team.”

Austin will not play Saturday vs. LSU.

Seriously, we finally find out one of the players is suspended, and it's for violation of team rules?? Granted, he probably deserved it: WTVD's Mark Armstrong tweeted that the suspension could be partially due to a post Austin put up on Facebook, but he's also been skipping classes and dogging it at practice. The kid may have seen the writing on the wall already and started behaving accordingly, which is unfortunate. Here's hoping we get some more concrete resolution on everything, and soon... gameday is four days from now.