Even on the heels of a pandemic that hasn’t exactly gone away, with the Delta variant currently wreaking havoc, North Carolina is on the verge of selling out its season allotment of football tickets again.

UNC’s football twitter accounted tweeted Tuesday morning that the fifth of the program’s seven home games is now officially sold out, leaving just home dates versus Georgia State on Sept. 11 and Wofford on Nov. 20 as the only remaining games with tickets still available.

The five games slated for Kenan Stadium that have sold out are Virginia (Sept. 18), Duke (Oct. 2), Florida State (Oct. 9), Miami (Oct. 16), and Wake Forest (Nov. 6).

“I challenged our fans to buy in. People said fans aren't coming to the games,” UNC Coach Mack Brown said three weeks ago at the ACC Kickoff, when asked about what has helped the program turn around from where it was when Brown took over nearly three years ago. “I said, ‘C'mon, fans, you want to be a good football program, you have to be a good fan base.’

“We sold out every game, one of seven teams to sell out every game in 2019. We've already sold (most) all of our season tickets, which is amazing after the very difficult year most people have had financially over the last year.”

After winning five games in the two seasons before Brown was hired, the Tar Heels went 7-6 in 2019 capping the season with a lopsided win over Temple in the Military Bowl. Last fall, Carolina finished 8-4 and ranked No. 13 in the final CFP poll after losing to Texas A&M in the Orange Bowl, the program’s first major bowl game appearance in 71 years.

A few weeks earlier, the Tar Heels picked up a road win over then-No. 9 Miami with a 62-26 rout of the Hurricanes. They were also competitive in a loss to Notre Dame the day after Thanksgiving. So that performance, in which they led for a while, and the A&M game, in which UNC led well into the fourth quarter, have given fans more reasons to buy into what Brown and his staff are doing in Chapel Hill. Both the Aggies and Fighting Irish finished ranked in the top five.

“We have a great product, a great academic school, small campus,” Brown said. “It's one of the nicest in the country. We have a tremendous staff, a real commitment from our administration, and our fan base is all in. When you put those things together, it makes it for a really special opportunity moving forward.”

UNC sold out all of its home games in 2019. Last fall, with COVD-19 affecting all sports attendances, there were only limited tickets available to Carolina home games, capped at just over 3,000 per home game aside from the pener versus Syracuse, in which no fans were allowed inside Kenan Stadium.

While all five home games sold out so far are against ACC teams, the Wake game will not count in the conference standings. Several years ago, UNC and Wake Forest agreed to a home-and-home series outside of league play because the schools don’t meet very often on the field anymore. UNC lost at Wake in 2019 in the first game of the series.