114: 🏈 Carolina losing streaks

UNC has lost four or more consecutive games in 12 of its last 26 seasons.

North Carolina football looks to end its four-game losing streak Saturday in Charlottesville against Virginia.

This current streak continues a pattern seen throughout recent Carolina football history. UNC has lost four or more consecutive games in 12 of its last 26 seasons.

The Heels have put together a winning streak of four or more consecutive games in nine of the last 26 seasons.

Carolina is 164-166 since the start of the 1998 season, or two wins shy of a .500 winning percentage. This stretch covers the first full season after Mack Brown departed for Texas¹ up until present today in the Brown 2.0 era.

Only one of the last six coaches avoided a streak of four losses. Everett Withers directed the Heels for only one season.

In order to better visualize these streaks, here is a breakdown showing wins and losses by game number of each season with losing streaks highlighted.

Nothing lasts forever

Brown’s first tenure as head coach featured losing streaks of six games, four games, and 10 games. All three of those streaks came in 1988 and 1989 or Brown’s first two seasons as head coach.

Before he left for Texas, Carolina won 20 of its last 24 games. UNC finished in the AP top ten in consecutive seasons in 1996 and 1997. Brown won a National Championship at Texas eight seasons later.

In his second act, Carolina has two winning streaks of four or more consecutive games. UNC won six games in a row in 2022 and six straight games to start the 2023 season.

This era has also featured two such losing streaks of four games. This includes the final four games of the 2022 season² and the last four games of the current season. The Heels have won just 11 of their last 24 games under Brown dating back to the 21-17 loss to Georgia Tech in November of 2022.

I remain curious how the 2.0 version of the Mack Brown era ends³. Because no head coach has been on the sideline for more games at Carolina than Brown. This means he has won more games than any other head coach, and lost more games too.

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Want to explore more college football data? Check out this app covering the 2024 season. It features team ratings from popular systems, conference standings with point differentials by location, and spreads and totals for all FBS matchups. And with college football now playing on weeknights⁴, the app updates daily too.

Here is the code to produce the chart in this post. This uses the {gtUtils} package and indicator boxes. If you have any feedback on how to improve it, please let me know.

1. This excludes the 1998 Gator Bowl from the 1997 season where Carl Torbush directed the Heels to 42-3 win over Virginia Tech. Prior to returning to Carolina for his second act, Carolina was 124-135 or 11 games below .500 without Brown as its head coach.

2. This was a season that Carolina made it to the ACC Championship game :/

3. It would be shortsighted to end this era on sour terms. Of course, in any relationship, that goes both ways.

4. Kennesaw State won outright as a 27 point underdog against Liberty last night. That’s now 25 double-digit underdogs that have won outright this season.