How is UNC dealing with this crazy scheduling gap? With a little help from its foes.
Mack Brown let his team finish practice last Thursday before he told them that Saturday’s game against Charlotte, 48 hours away, had been canceled.
“They actually thought I was kidding at first,” the North Carolina coach said Tuesday. “I had to say, ‘It’s not funny. It’s really true.’”
The cancellation of that game, combined with Saturday’s scheduled off date, left the Tar Heels with 21 days between games, from the September 12 opener against Syracuse to the trip to Boston College on October 3.
It feels, to use a word that’s struggling mightily from overuse, unprecedented.
It actually isn’t.
You only have to dig back into ACC history to 2017, when both Miami and Florida State lost mid-September games because of the untimely arrival of Hurricane Irma, then had their game against each other the next week pushed back to a shared open date in October because of combined campus disruption.
Miami, after pulling out of a game at Arkansas State and sending its players home to ride out the hurricane with their families, ended up practicing in Orlando for a week while Coral Gables cleaned up.
“We had a real sense of urgency getting them back into football condition,” then-Miami coach, now-ACC Network analyst Mark Richt said this week. “Not just cardiovascular, but also the physical mentality of playing the game.”
The Hurricanes were fortunate to have started the season with Bethune-Cookman and resumed it with Toledo, a soft takeoff and landing that served as a springboard for a 10-0 record before Miami lost in sequence to Pittsburgh, Clemson in the ACC title game and Wisconsin in the Orange Bowl.
If that bodes well for the Tar Heels, there’s also the example of Florida State, which was coming off a season-opening loss to Alabama and had to jump right back into ACC play with a home game against N.C. State. The Seminoles lost both and the early disruption was one of many factors that led to the ugly end of the Jimbo Fisher regime.
Florida State was able to reschedule its postponed game against Louisiana-Monroe for ACC championship day. The Hurricanes were otherwise occupied that day and played only 11 regular-season games. North Carolina tried to find a replacement opponent for this weekend, but couldn’t pull it off on short notice.
Richt’s experience at Miami was a little different than North Carolina’s; his team was scattered throughout the state while the Tar Heels have been sequestered on campus for months now. But he certainly empathizes with the difficulty of preparing when the next game keeps moving farther into the distance. That was true for North Carolina last week and became true for Wake Forest on Tuesday when its Saturday game against Notre Dame was postponed because of COVID-19.
“I think they need to be able to process what just happened,” Richt said. “Take the day off. Maybe the next day. Even let your staff have a break. I think the players would probably need a mental break from all this prepping and not playing. I wouldn’t be in a major hurry to get into the grind and prepare for the next team without giving everybody a reprieve from game-planning and practicing and all those things.”
As North Carolina trudges through its second week off, Brown said his plan is to hit the reset button on the season, to pretend like the win over Syracuse game never happened. The young players who would have gotten game time against Charlotte will get more scrimmage time; the older players more time to hone fundamentals.
It’s the best Brown can do on short notice in a season when everyone is making it up on the fly and making the best of it. At least for this situation, there’s at least a little bit of a precedent.
“Everyone keeps asking me what I would do,” Richt said. “I’ve kind of enjoyed not having to worry about that.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "How is UNC dealing with this crazy scheduling gap? With a little help from its foes.."
