North Carolina tried finding an opponent to replace Charlotte and visit Chapel Hill on Sept. 26, but couldn’t work out a deal with any of the prospective schools, Director of Athletics Bubba Cunningham said on the school’s Carolina Insider Podcast on Monday.

UNC hit the phones over the weekend presumably calling all or most of the six FBS teams that have an open date this coming weekend. Cunningham didn’t specify which schools UNC conversed with, but he was clear an effort was made.

“Rick Steinbacher really did a ton of work calling everybody,” Cunningham said, referring to UNC's Senior Associate A.D., Capital Projects and Facilities. “He scoured the country looking for games to play. There were a couple that were available that didn’t make sense for us, and we thought we had a couple that we could play, and it didn’t make sense for them.”

Charlotte cancelled its game at Carolina for this past weekend because it had to quarantine some players identified through COVID-19 contact tracing. The 49ers host Georgia State this weekend, so they were not an option. The six FBS programs that are currently playing football and don’t reside in the ACC with open dates this weekend are Navy, Marshall, Middle Tennessee State, Western Kentucky, Coastal Carolina and Air Force.

AFA, which is located in Colorado Springs, CO, is obviously the furthest away and is only slated to play two games this season. Western Kentucky is the second furthest school from Chapel Hill, as Bowling Green, KY, is 538 miles from UNC’s campus. The other four schools are fairly short bus rides from UNC.

“There’s a lot of factors that go into it,” Cunningham said. “It’s your availability, how much you can pay and is someone willing to come and willing to travel. Ideally, we wanted somebody local that could bus, and it just did not work out, unfortunately, for next weekend.”

And, of course, money was a factor.

“We do have a little bit of money left in the budget to pay Charlotte to come, so if we could have gotten a game for that amount of money we were certainly willing to do that,” Cunningham said. “Or, start a home-and-home; start the home game at our place and we would return the game.

“But a couple of schools that we talked to were asking for such an outrageous amount of money given that we have no fans, it made no sense at all. It’s a little disingenuous for those people to say, ‘Well jeeze, we should have played.’ It was absurd what they were asking for.”

So, unless the unforeseen happens and a deal is made, the Tar Heels will be off this weekend, giving them consecutive weeks off for the first time since 1952, when a polio outbreak forced UNC to cancel two games.

UNC's next game is Oct. 3 at Boston College.