A Look at What Preceded the Tar Heels' Opting Out
On September 4, 2015, Michael Carter planted his foot, took a hit from a defender and his knee gave way.
Carter had already become a star for his high school—Florida power Navarre— rushing for 1,427 yards and 20 touchdowns in his freshman and sophomore seasons, while catching 34 passes for 481 yards and five scores. Three games into his junior year, he already had 532 yards and eight touchdowns, averaging 11.6 yards per carry.
The Florida Gators, Tennessee Volunteers and Mississippi State Bulldogs had already offered him. It seemed certain that other SEC schools would follow suit as he continued to establish himself as a top running back recruit.
Then he planted during a game, however.
At first they thought the leg was broken, but an MRI ruled that out.
Instead, he had an alphabet soup of problems.
"My PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) is torn completely. I have partial tears in my LCL (lateral collateral ligament) and meniscus," Carter said to the local media at the time.
He would miss the rest of the season and be sidelined for eight to 10 months—while schools around the nation decided who they wanted to sign for their backfields of the future.
Some knee injuries allow the players to return sooner, but, as he coach explained to the South Florida media, Carter would need a longer recovery, because they needed to graft tissue from elsewhere in his body into the knee joint to help repair it.”
After a fast start to his college career, Carter broke his wrist during a pre-season scrimmage and ended up missing the first three games of his sophomore year.
As his junior year ends, Carter has added a new body part to his list of problems—he’s battling a shoulder injury.
Throughout it all, Carter has earned praise from teammates and coaches, in high school and college, who all mention the same thing—his positive attitude and contagious spirit, plus a willingness to do anything for the team.
Michael Carter, who remained upbeat and team-oriented while they cut meat from one part of his body and used it to sew up another, knows what can happen in just one game of football. Michael Carter, who received one more SEC offer after his injury—from Vanderbilt—knows what the impact of that injury can be.
Michael Carter has decided that the next time he risks his knee, wrist, shoulder, or any other part of his body, he should get paid.
Javonte Williams also knows what it’s like to have to make the cut for the next level of football. He was a linebacker, averaging 16 tackles a game for his school—who had won state titles each of his first three years on the team. But after his junior year, he hadn’t gotten any offers from Power Five schools. Alabama told him he was too short. NC State said he was too slow. Carolina just didn’t think he was a linebacker.
He faced a choice between walking on, which meant paying his own way for college, playing for a school outside the Power Five, or change positions. He chose the latter, to see if anyone liked him better as a running back.
Javonte Williams understands that decisionmakers are fickle, and dreams of a young player mean nothing to them—not when compared to a half-inch of height or a tenth of a second on a stopwatch.
Then there’s Chazz Surratt—the highly rated quarterback that planned to play for David Cutcliffe, then follow former Cutcliffe protégés Peyton and Eli Manning into the NFL.
But UNC coach Larry Fedora kept recruiting Surratt after he committed to Duke.
"He was important to us," Fedora said, years later. "He was the guy that we had picked from within the state that we felt could help us win a championship. So, especially at that position, when you have one in the state, you've got to find a way to get him."
"The recruiting process is never over until either they show up on campus in January or they sign in February," then-quarterbacks coach Keith Heckendorf told Inside Carolina.
The full-court press worked. Surratt changed his mind and came to Carolina. After all, the head coach had told him he was “the guy that we had picked.”
Shortly after making the decision, Surratt was tackled in the first quarter of a high school game. He stuck out his throwing arm to brace himself and dislocated his shoulder. The elbow injury ended his senior year in high school.
He sat out his first year, redshirting while Mitch Trubisky ran the offense. When Trubisky left for the NFL, it was Surratt’s time to shine.
Until late March, 11 days before UNC’s spring game, when the Tar Heels welcomed LSU graduate transfer Brandon Harris, who was named the starter for the opener.
It took Surratt one game to earn a start of his own, but he suffered an injury in the first half.
“The very first time I ran it, I got hit in my lower back and it progressively got worse as the game went on,” Surratt said afterward. “I could have went back, but that’s a head coach’s decision.”
He would appear in nine games that year and start seven, but the job was never truly his. In the midst of a three-game stretch where he threw 104 passes, he was benched for a game against Virginia, because Fedora said Harris had a better week of practice.
He would throw 23 more passes in his college career.
Surratt and Harris then split reps in practice the following week, before the redshirt freshman got the start against Virginia Tech and was mauled, leaving another game due to injury. According to repots by Tar Heel Illustrated, he suffered torn ligaments in his right (non-throwing) wrist. But he still took the field in two of the final four games of the season.
By then, Fedora seemed to have picked another guy to lead him to a championship, and another. Jace Ruder committed to the Tar Heels in June of 2017. Surratt had yet to appear in a game for the Tar Heels, and he’d already seen a transfer and a younger recruit brought in at his position.
A few weeks after his redshirt freshman year ended, Fedora convinced another promising quarterback to change his mind, as Cade Fortin decommitted from Texas A&M and flipped to the Tar Heels.
Surratt had to sit out the first four games in 2018 after getting suspended for selling his school-issued Air Jordans, along with several other teammates. When he returned, he again tore ligaments in the same wrist and was knocked out for the year.
By the time he took the field again, his coach was gone and he’d switched sides of the ball, gaining weight and learning the linebacker position, where the biggest concern, according to co-defensive coordinator Tommy Thigpen, was whether he’d be willing to “stick his face in the fight” and take a hit.
He showed that he was willing and quickly became one of the best linebackers in the league and a leader on the defense.
After three injuries, being sent onto the field while hurt and numerous broken promises, Surratt has decided its time to look out for his career.
Dyami Brown has been injury free throughout high school and college, but his brother, Khafre, has had two surgeries on the same ACL and spent a year of high school battling back from the injury. “There was some concern he might have lost a step,” said one online recruiting site’s bio of the younger Brown. “Was one of the faster prospects in the country as a sophomore prior to a knee injury, but still has very good speed,” said another.
Four players—following a total of six injuries, two position changes, untold lies and countless times being written off for being a little short, slow or just not the right look, they made four tough decisions. They know, more than just about anyone criticizing them, just how ruthless a world they’re about to enter.
Believe it or not, they want to beat Texas A&M as much as anyone questioning their loyalty. Having literally given blood, sweat and tears, as well as ligaments and other assorted tissue, they probably want to win more.
But after a lifetime’s worth of taking ones for the team, they’ve decided to take some time for themselves. In the middle of a pandemic, with a shot at the NFL on the line, they don’t want to risk an awkward plant or an unlucky hit, or give any of the decision makers one more reason to doubt.
Don’t wonder why they didn’t have one more game in them. Wonder at the fact that they gave as much as they did.
