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Rain showers this morning with numerous thunderstorms developing during the afternoon hours. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High 76F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..
Thunderstorms this evening followed by occasional showers overnight. Low 58F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Updated: May 18, 2024 @ 3:02 am
CHAPEL HILL — North Carolina hasn’t found a dance partner on short notice, and so its football schedule remains vacant for Saturday.
Athletics director Bubba Cunningham pursued picking up a replacement game to plug into this weekend’s Sept. 26 open date on the schedule, after the Tar Heels’ game against Charlotte last weekend became sacked by coronavirus.
The 49ers were forced to cancel two days before that non-conference matchup was to be played at Kenan Stadium, due to contact tracing quarantines that depleted their team and effectively wiped out the availability of their offensive line.
Cunningham said in the immediate aftermath of Charlotte pulling out that North Carolina would comb through national scheduling databases in an effort to locate a new opponent to step in and fill an unoccupied spot on its schedule, perhaps as soon as Sept. 26, the Saturday that’s approaching.
But the Tar Heels’ sudden search hasn’t turned up a puzzle piece that fits, team spokesman Jeremy Sharpe said.
“After working the phones all weekend, we’ve been unable to secure an opponent for this coming Saturday,” Sharpe wrote in an email.
North Carolina’s next scheduled game is Oct. 3 at Boston College. When kickoff arrives that day on Boston College’s campus at Alumni Stadium, three weeks will have passed between games for coach Mack Brown’s Tar Heels, who opened the season Sept. 12 by defeating Syracuse.
North Carolina moved up one position to a ranking of No. 11 in the Associated Press poll this week.
Charlotte of Conference USA was to be the one non-league contest on the Tar Heels’ 11-game schedule under the Atlantic Coast Conference’s football model this fall. That modified scheduling plan, the ACC’s hopeful path for conducting a season amid the global pandemic, designated Sept. 26 and Nov. 21 as the open dates on North Carolina’s schedule.
Presumably, Cunningham will turn his attention to finding a non-conference opponent for Nov. 21, or maybe even Dec. 12. Charlotte and the Tar Heels, who are scheduled to meet in 2024 and 2025, don’t have dates that align for the remainder of this season.
“We knew we weren’t going to play all the games this year,” Cunningham said last week, “and Coach Brown and the team obviously were disappointed, but it was something we expected. We didn’t know when, but we did expect something like this could happen.”
In late July, when the ACC unveiled its new football model for the fall in this time of coronavirus, the league said its championship game would be held either Dec. 12 or Dec. 19 at Bank of American Stadium in Charlotte. Then last week, the ACC moved the Virginia at Virginia Tech game from Sept. 19 to Dec. 12, due to COVID-19 cases and required quarantining protocols affecting Virginia Tech’s team.
That decision appears to cement Dec. 19 as the date of the ACC championship game, thus turning Dec. 12 into an additional scheduling opportunity for potential makeup games at the end of the regular season.
This article originally appeared on Times-News: UNC’s search for replacement game on short notice turns up empty
