CHAPEL HILL — Ten days ago, as North Carolina coach Mack Brown departed Kenan Football Center and headed home with coronavirus having just sacked an opponent and suddenly robbed his team of a scheduled game, a certain hopefulness buoyed him.
But that feeling soon sank into stark reality.
“I said, ‘Ah, we’ll get a game,’ ” Brown said, recalling the moment. “And then you think about it, it’s kind of crazy to think that you can just say, ‘Hey, let’s call so-and-so and see if they want to come.’ Nobody’s ever done this stuff before. Nobody’s ever tried to find a game where you just say, ‘Oh, wonder who’s not playing this week.’ It’s just different.”
While the Tar Heels wait out another open weekend during their longest break between regular-season games in 68 years, the complexities and uncertainties of conducting this college football season amid the pandemic have been reinforced all over again.
When kickoff arrives next weekend for North Carolina’s Oct. 3 road assignment at Boston College, three weeks will have passed since the 11th-ranked Tar Heels played their only game of the season.
They opened with a Sept. 12 defeat of Syracuse at empty Kenan Stadium, before becoming stuck in coronavirus limbo. Contract tracing quarantines wrecked their Sept. 19 non-conference matchup against Charlotte, ahead of this weekend’s open date that was unable to be transformed into a schedule filler on short notice.
“I’ve told them it is what it is,” Brown said, referring to his message to players and coaches. “It could happen again sometime this year. This is the year of uncertainty, so don’t get into, ‘I’m up, I’m down, I hate this.’ It doesn’t matter. It is what it is.”
Consider it an unwanted chapter of history, this season unlike any other mired in a 21-day gap between games, the longest regular-season layoff for North Carolina since a polio outbreak on campus in 1952 — the year before the Atlantic Coast Conference was formed, when North Carolina competed in the Southern Conference.
Back then, the Tar Heels were idle from their Sept. 27 season opener, after losing against Texas, to Oct. 18, a loss to Wake Forest. Games against North Carolina State and Georgia were canceled during that stretch due to the polio flare-up.
While disturbances were expected along the hopeful course for this season — with coronavirus testing administered to teams three times per week, required 14-day quarantines for positives and contact tracing protocols among the many safety measures in place — the unknown of when those interruptions will occur remains impossible to predict.
“It’s definitely not what we expected,” North Carolina quarterback Sam Howell said. “We expected to play Charlotte last week coming into a bye. But I would say we have a pretty mature team, and everyone’s in a good place mentally. We know this season any game can be taken away from us at any time.”
The 69-year-old Brown, in his 43rd season of college coaching and his 32nd year as a head coach, said he can’t remember a regular season during which one of his teams has encountered back-to-back open weekends with no games to play.
Now, what unfolds in front of North Carolina on the schedule are seven straight weeks of ACC games — at Boston College, home against Virginia Tech, at Florida State, home against North Carolina State and so on — and perhaps more if its Nov. 21 open date can be used by athletics director Bubba Cunningham to plug in a replacement game for the Charlotte cancellation.
Brown said he has instructed the Tar Heels to reach for a reset button in their approach.
“What we told our players and coaches is let’s just start the season over,” Brown said. “Syracuse was a game, it’s done, so we’re (one week) out from the opener. So let’s just go back and restart, and that’s what we’re trying to get their mentality to be.”
On the Thursday morning prior to Charlotte’s scheduled visit, 49ers athletics director Mike Hill called his counterpart Cunningham and pulled the plug on the Sept. 19 game that was to be played in Chapel Hill. Contract tracing quarantines had depleted Charlotte’s team, and effectively wiped out the availability of its offensive line.
Brown received word about the cancellation during North Carolina’s practice session that day, and he informed his team afterward.
“They actually thought I was kidding at first, because I can be a smart aleck,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Charlotte’s not coming.’ And they said, ‘Now come on, Coach, that’s not funny.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not funny, it’s really true.’ ”
Cunningham and senior associate athletics director Rick Steinbacher then launched into the pursuit of picking up a replacement game for this weekend’s Sept. 26 open date on the schedule. But a suitable dance partner couldn’t be found on such short notice.
Brown said Steinbacher had discussions with more than a dozen schools, “about 13 or 15 people or something to try to make it work, and it just didn’t work.” The coach said Steinbacher has turned his attention to trying to locate a non-conference opponent for Nov. 21 or maybe even Dec. 12, the week prior to the ACC championship game, scheduled for Dec. 19 in Charlotte.
“Change is imminent,” Cunningham said, taking the long view on the season. “We are going to have change, we are going to have unpredictability, and what we have to have is flexibility and people who are willing to adjust to it, and our guys have been great.”
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Stuck in coronavirus limbo, UNC reaches for reset button on season
