UNC Football: Confidence remains high despite loss in this week’s FanPulse survey

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across college sports. Each week during the college sports season, we will send out polls to plug in fans to each team. Tar Heel fans can sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

It’s hard to imagine what we did to deserve such a wild, crazy weekend of college football, but it was welcomed by UNC fans following the loss to Wake Forest. Week 3 was filled with upsets, close games, and yes, a generous helping of one-sided beatdowns. Now that it’s over, let’s take a look at the new SB Nation FanPulse top 25 rankings:

Let’s start with the obvious: for the third week in a row, UNC is exempt from the list after suffering their first loss of the season. Should they beat App State, we may be able to revisit their chances of receiving votes from fans following the virtually inevitable loss against Clemson next weekend. Do they have a chance against the Tigers? Sure, but people who play the lottery also have a chance to win millions of dollars, so make of that what you will. Moving on.

The only other ACC team in this weeks’ top 25 aside from Clemson is the Virginia Cavaliers. The Hoos are coming off of a wild victory over Florida State where we yet again also saw some poor clock management by the refs, though this time it was much more costly than what happened in Winston-Salem. Virginia fans stormed the field afterwards, forgetting in that particular moment that they were the ranked team and the Seminoles were unranked. Maybe their energy levels were especially high after raising a national championship banner for the basketball team, or maybe beating a traditional powerhouse in general was cause enough to do it. The world will never know.

Circling back around to the Tar Heels, it appears that the confidence in everything that Mack Brown is doing has not wavered:

With the faith in the program holding firm at 100%, it’s clear that fans did not see anything especially alarming in the loss against Wake. It’s hard to look too much into what happened, as the Heels’ offensive line took a beating, Jason Strowbridge was out for the game with a sore ankle, and when looking at at how rattled Sam Howell was in the first half, he stepped up in a big way in the fourth quarter. In fact, one could argue the entire team stepped up near the end of the game, which is exactly what fans want to see out of their team if they are going to suffer any type of loss.

The Heels will look to get things back on track this Saturday when App State comes to visit Kenan Stadium. What do you think the outcome will be for this week’s matchup? Also, how are you feeling about the way things are currently going for the Heels? Please feel free to let us know in the comments below, and if you haven’t already, sign up for our weekly FanPulse survey by clicking the link at the top of this article.