CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — – Miami kept finishing drives in the end zone, much as it had all season in riding a high-scoring attack to an unbeaten record and a No. 1 ranking.<\/p>\n
The defense? It was a struggle, up until Marquise Lightfoot<\/a> came up with the play that finally helped the Hurricanes avoid a seismic upset.<\/p>\n “All night,” quarterback Darian Mensah<\/a> said, “they were just waiting for that play to happen.”<\/p>\n Mark Fletcher Jr<\/a>. punched in the go-ahead 2-yard touchdown run on fourth down with 7:49 left, then Lightfoot forced a fumble on the ensuing possession that helped the Hurricanes finally shake free to beat North Carolina 38-35 on Saturday night.<\/p>\n That ultimately helped send the Hurricanes through to next week’s marquee road matchup with No. 5 Notre Dame, though only after seeing their defense struggle to get off the field the entire way.<\/p>\n The Hurricanes (8-0, 6-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) got their latest humming-along performance from the nation’s best offense, from Fletcher accounting for three touchdowns to the Mensah-to-Malachi Toney<\/a> connection striking twice for TDs. Miami needed that to surprisingly keep pace with the Tar Heels (4-4, 2-3), who kept moving the chains and sustaining drives to take a surprising 28-24 lead on Demon June<\/a>‘s 1-yard rush with 11:46 to go.<\/p>\n But after Fletcher’s go-ahead score, Lightfoot and Justin Scott<\/a> teamed up for the critical stop, with Lightfoot stripping Billy Edwards Jr<\/a>. from behind as he tried to throw, and Scott recovering the fumble with 5:33 left.<\/p>\n “He decided to take a second decision, bat the ball, hold the ball a little longer,” Lightfoot said, “so I was able to get there.”<\/p>\n That was part of what turned into a game-deciding sequence. Miami’s offense followed by stretching the lead, getting a terrific individual effort on Elija Lofton’s leap over a would-be tackler on a catch to move the chains and ultimately set up Mensah’s 9-yard scoring strike to Toney to make it 38-28 with 2:33 left.<\/p>\n “In games like that, really important – like we tell our players – you just keep playing,” Miami coach Mario Cristobal said. “Because you don’t know what play is going to turn the whole thing around. And certainly the fumble was a massive turnaround that swung the momentum in the game.”<\/p>\n This one against the team led by NFL coaching icon Bill Belichick went to the final minute, with Miami having to recover an onside kick – coming after North Carolina had a pair of recoveries negated by penalties – before finally being able to kneel it out.<\/p>\n “We knew they were wheels-up for the challenge,” said Fletcher, whose two scores on the ground allowed him to tie the program’s career rushing TD mark.<\/p>\n North Carolina fell to 0-12 against No. 1-ranked teams.<\/p>\n Edwards threw for a season-high 341 yards to go with four touchdowns for UNC, with two of those scores going to tight end Jelani Thurman<\/a>. Edwards and the offense spent the entire evening on the move, with the line opening lanes and receivers finding wide gaps for Edwards to target.<\/p>\n As the game wore on, the Tar Heels continued to sustain drives, including a 16-play TD drive lasting nearly 8 1\/2 minutes, that kept them hovering within range of an upset deep into the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n “Obviously with a team like Miami, it’s going to come down to critical plays, critical moments,” Edwards said, who noted later: “This isn’t the business for moral victories.”<\/p>\n The takeaway<\/p>\n Miami: The defensive showing was a concerning way to go into the tussle with the Fighting Irish, with Miami giving up its highest total in regulation this year.<\/p>\n “I thought there were some soft spots in our coverage where our zone drops weren’t as good, as detailed,” Cristobal said.<\/p>\n “I didn’t think we swarmed to the ball like we had been, we usually run to the football and get a lot of hats there. Didn’t happen. We were very sporadic in the way we tackled. And then sometimes we just got beat in man coverage, that simple.”<\/p>\n UNC: The Tar Heels had squandered momentum from back-to-back wins at then-No. 25 Pitt and Duke by losing at home in overtime last week to a Syracuse team sitting at 0-4 in the ACC. The Tar Heels responded with a performance that few could’ve expected against the Hurricanes.<\/p>\n “Lot of effort, lot of toughness, lot of mental toughness, lot of competitiveness,” Belichick said. “Just disappointing to come up short here two weeks in a row.”<\/p>\n Up next<\/p>\n Miami: The Hurricanes’ game at Notre Dame next Saturday is a rematch of last year’s game that ultimately swung a College Football Playoff bid to the Hurricanes instead of the Irish.<\/p>\n UNC: The Tar Heels step out of ACC play to visit UConn next Saturday.<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n Sign up for Top 25 poll alerts here<\/a>. Visit the Top 25 here<\/a> and see AP’s full college football coverage here.<\/a>br\/]<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2026 ESPN Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — – Miami kept finishing drives in the end zone, much as it had all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[173054,143,4899,123,125,5079,124,4676],"class_list":["post-444180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-173054","tag-college-football","tag-espn","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-hurricanes","tag-miami-news","tag-north-carolina-tar-heels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}