Will college football be played this weekend? Stay tuned.

In what might be generously called a topsy-turvy world, the planet may be tilting on its axis, depending on how the President and First Lady recover from contracting COVID-19.

Though their condition at this point isn’t nearly as serious, and hopefully will never be, this does remind us somewhat of other crises involving presidents of The United States, three of them just 10 years apart.

In 1981, on the day of the NCAA championship between Carolina and Indiana in Philadelphia, President Reagan was shot on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C., jeopardizing the game until Reagan was deemed out of danger.

Ten years later, on the evening of the game between UNC and NC State at the Smith Center, the crowd already in the dome was told to go home because the U.S. had entered the Gulf War.

The game was rescheduled for three weeks later, as you recall, the night after the teams met in Raleigh. The Tar Heels avenged a 7-point loss at Reynolds Coliseum with a 22-point victory in Chapel Hill, which began a streak of 14 wins in 15 games all the way to the Final Four.

Pretty amazingly, ten years after that came 911 and the postponement of all college and pro football that weekend while President Bush closed down the country to make it safe from further attacks. The 0-3 Tar Heels’ game with lowly SMU was moved to end of the season, which was bad news after already losing at Oklahoma, Maryland and Texas.

But when the schedule resumed, Carolina turned around John Bunting’s first team with a startling 41-9 blowout of top-10 Florida State at Kenan, beginning a five-game win streak that catapulted those Tar Heels to the Peach Bowl and a victory over Auburn that capped off the 8-5 record.

Unless the President and First Lady take serious turns for the worse, the games will go on this weekend. But it is just another eerie shadow of an autumn already plagued by the coronavirus.

Mack Brown’s Tar Heels are going to Boston College, where the stadium will be empty and the city’s pro sports teams are reeling from bad seasons and abrupt endings.

And now comes the drama of how this latest development will affect the election.

 

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