Two late losses banished Carolina to the Sun Bowl.
It’s a showcase game for the Tar Heels, but a bad assignment for the fans hoping to follow them to the finale of the 2016 football season. That’s what losing to Duke and State will get you – a game against Stanford in the outpost that is, appropriately for Larry Fedora’s air-attack offense, in El Paso, Texas.
Carolina got the far-away nod the day before New Year’s Eve by losing their last two league games to their arch rivals. The Sun Bowl is still a second-tier bowl that pits an ACC team versus a Pac 12 opponent every year. But, it’s the game that most ACC schools hate because far fewer of their fans will travel all the way to West Texas than to, say, Charlotte’s Belk Bowl or New York City for the Pinstripe.
Stanford, which has been a ranked power for the last decade, is a quality opponent Carolina has a good chance to beat. The game is on CBS on the Friday of New Year’s weekend, the only game in the 2 pm time slot. After learning how expensive travel packages out there are, most Tar Heel fans will opt for their HD TVs and UNC will have to eat or give away most of the tickets it is required to buy.
Because the ACC provides one team every year, schools take turns making the trip to the Sun Bowl, where UNC has played four times but not since 1994. Carolina is 2-2 in four Sun Bowls – victories over Texas Tech and Texas in 1972 and ’82 and losses to Mississippi State in 1974 and Texas twenty years later.
Since the ACC-Pac 12 match up was established in 2010, Miami twice, Georgia Tech twice, Virginia Tech and Duke have taken turns getting the invite.
Carolina was hoping for the Belk Bowl, where UNC fans could make the day trip to Charlotte to face an SEC opponent, or to the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium, which prefers at least one team with a fan base in reasonable driving distance from New York City. But Virginia Tech gets to play in Charlotte v. Arkansas after its narrow loss to Clemson in the ACC championship game and Pitt goes Pinstriping against Northwestern. This is Carolina’s year for the Sun Bowl, so at least UNC alumni and fans in the Southwest can see the Heels play.
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