You could call Carolina’s revised schedule back-ended and backhanded.

Silly me. When the re-juggled football opponents came out for the 2020 season, I thought for sure Notre Dame would open here in Chapel Hill — a national TV gem no matter how long the season lasted. Instead, the Fighting Irish are coming to town on Friday, November 27, and you can probably get some pretty good odds in Vegas that the season won’t last that long due to the virus.

So what did the ACC do instead? Notre Dame gets to open at home against Duke, which is picked as a solid second-division team in the overall standings. That game will be on NBC, but it shapes up as a clunker rather than a classic. The league schedule, in general, looks weaker earlier than later.

The Tar Heels open at home on September 12 against Syracuse, which wasn’t on their schedule until a couple of weeks ago. And the next week, unless it is the originally slated James Madison, they will have to prepare for another brand-new opponent on short notice. Of their 11 games, six are at home, five on the road.

Carolina does have a great chance to go 3-0 out of the blocks, with a date at Boston College in week three, but that means the second half of the schedule is a bear. Home games with Virginia Tech, N.C. State, Wake Forest and Notre Dame, plus additional road trips to Florida State, Virginia, Duke and Miami.

If the No. 19 Heels are as good as they’re supposed to be, their last two games could determine whether they can finish in the top two and move on to Charlotte to play for the ACC championship. The Fighting Irish the day after Thanksgiving and on the road at Miami, always a tough place to play, are pretty back-handed.

What the season and the make-up of teams will look like by then remains the big question as practice opened yesterday at the football complex. While Clemson is still the conference favorite, the Tigers have also been back-ended, with their last four games on the road at Notre Dame, FSU and Virginia Tech with a home game against a Pitt team that was supposed to challenge for the Coastal Division.

Stay safe and masked-up for one of the wildest football seasons imaginable.

 

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