7/30/2020 football Edit

AJ: ACC Slate Appears Manageable For Heels

The Tar Heels' 10-game ACC schedule is challenging, but not overwhelming if they play to potential. (Jenna Miller, THI)

Andrew Jones • TarHeelIllustrated

Publisher

Andrew Jones has covered sports for 26 years, including all major college & professional sports for daily newspapers & national sites. He's done radio and TV & is entering his seventh year at THI.

Finally, 2020 gave us something fun.

Wednesday afternoon at around 4:35 seemed a bit like Selection Sunday, when the NCAA reveals its annual 68-team hoops bracket. The unknown was no longer. The ACC had at long last made up its mind.

Sort of.

It unveiled a league football schedule for this year. That slate includes Notre Dame, which can compete for the ACC championship. And, it’s looking more and more like there will be football in some fashion this fall.

Shew!

We don’t yet know the dates of the games, as of this writing, or the order. And there’s more stuff to iron out, in addition to each ACC team getting a nonconference game it can schedule. That Clemson-South Carolina streak should be okay, pending the SEC's eventual decision on its schedule.

So, given the alternative, and what many people with loud voices were pushing for, it appears we will have football this fall, and with a 10-game ACC slate, we will also get a pretty good idea of the league’s true pecking order.

A Clemson-Notre Dame title game some have been clamoring for over the last week could happen, though they meet in South Bend this season, so one of them will suffer an ACC loss.

Sam Howell and company face a schedule loaded with opportunity. (Jacob Turner, THI)

That opens the door for North Carolina to keep its trajectory in place and race to an ACC title game appearance versus the winner between the Tigers and Fighting Irish. You know the folks in Greensboro want at least tje Golden Domers or Hold That Tiger in that game.

Carolina’s slate really isn’t all that daunting, though it’s challenging enough Mack Brown and his staff will have a full understanding of who their team is by Thanksgiving.

Like Clemson, the Tar Heels also play Notre Dame, but they get the Irish inside Kenan Stadium. A Carolina win win could cancel out the Irish's ACC title hopes. Yes, Notre Dame has ACC footbll title hopes. It's still 2020.

The Heels also get nemesis Virginia Tech at home. Wake isn’t bad and the Deacs visit Chapel Hill for Surratt Bowl II giving Carolina a shot at redemption from last September.

NC State and Syracuse are also home games for the Tar Heels and might be the lesser of UNC’s ACC opponents.

The road slate is very interesting and could be much more challenging than it currently appears.

Miami’s range is what Miami’s range always is: From mediocre to really good. Florida State has a new staff and renewed optimism and the game is in Doak Campbell Stadium where the Tar Heels have won consecutive games. The first on a botched FSU field goal attempt as time expired in 2010 and the other on 54-yarder by Nick Weiler as the clock hit zero in 2016. By the way, the Heels’ wins at Miami and FSU in 2016 – three weeks apart – are the only time the program has won two true road games over ranked teams in the same season.

Brown's team heads to Florida twice and Boston once in the ACC's 10-game league slate for this fall. (Jacob Turner, THI)

Virginia is the defending Coastal Division champs though expectations are for a drop off, with Bryce Perkins and a few others having moved on. But the game is in Charlottesville and Bronco Mendenhall is a better coach than for which he gets credit. BC on the road with its grittiness and approach might not be a comfortable affair for the Heels, especially if it’s cold and nasty up there, and heading over to Duke during the David Cutcliffe era has been a war.

You won’t find any silliness here picking the Tar Heels to run the table or even warrant being in the College Football Playoff conversation well into November. There’s no point in getting ahead of things here. Let’s not forget, this is a program that was 7-6 a year ago, needed to win its last two regular season games just to get into a bowl, and lost at home to Appalachian State.

But Carolina’s nose is clearly pointed in the right direction and a winning record and then some is certainly a fair expectation with this schedule, and there’s an outside chance things could fall into place and they make some national noise. A chance.

The great thing is we’re one massive step closer to finding out where Sam Howell, Chazz Surratt, Dazz Newsome and company are as a team and where the program is as a whole.

Crazy as it seems, because that was starting to seem like wishful thinking.