NC State and UNC get ACC rolling earlier than usual, but not a moment too soon
It’s wild, just wild, that we’re digging into the first of the juicy local basketball rivalry games before Christmas, even. The ACC has been slowly siphoning conference games into December for a few years now in the quest for network inventory, but the pandemic has kicked that into another gear entirely.
Five conference games were already complete coming into this week, starting with Syracuse and Boston College on Dec. 12, and there’s nothing unusual about that. But there’s another taste Tuesday and then things kick into high gear next week, before we exit 2020.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but to an ACC fan, it has the feel of early January.
It’s early, either way, for N.C. State to host North Carolina, one of three conference games scheduled for Tuesday. Scheduled being the key word: one was already postponed (Syracuse-Notre Dame) and one other may yet be (Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel has tested positive for COVID-19 and will miss the game against Louisville).
The postponement pushed the Wolfpack and Tar Heels up two hours to 7 p.m., making an early meeting even earlier.
In the past few years, N.C. State has played Wake Forest and North Carolina has played Virginia in December games, but it is a little different for one of the league’s biggest rivalry games to happen this far forward in the season.
Bring it on. We’ve stumbled through a herky-jerky nonconference schedule full of glorified exhibition games and unnecessary multi-team tournaments when we could have just skipped straight to conference play in the first place, and while a few ACC teams still have a handful of nonconference games left to play, if they are indeed played at all, how necessary were any of them?
Life would go on just fine if Georgia Tech didn’t play UAB this week. For every game that’s really worth playing — like Saturday’s scheduled-on-the-fly meeting between Gonzaga and Virginia — there were a bunch that probably weren’t. Duke arrived at that conclusion on its own; the Blue Devils will resume ACC play after a 13-day break next week.
It would have been easier and simpler and safer for everyone to jump to this point right from the start, but what’s done is done and what’s postponed is postponed and what’s canceled is canceled.
The time has come now, and why not get things going in earnest with a Triangle rivalry game that very rarely disappoints?
You’d have to go back to the days of the old Big Four tournament to find North Carolina and N.C. State playing any earlier than this. This will break the record for their earliest official ACC meeting, which was Jan. 4, 1995, during a period of a few years in the middle of N.C. State’s Les Robinson Era when the UNC-N.C. State game served as an unofficial ACC season kickoff.
It does again during this very strange season, an idea potentially worth resurrecting down the road. With all due respect to the five games already played, none has the stakes this one does, not emotionally and not, potentially, in the standings. Both teams have beaten up on the lesser teams they have played while struggling against tougher opposition, which makes this a must-win for both.
Better play this one a bit sooner than usual than not at all, which isn’t hyperbole in these circumstances.
This story was originally published December 21, 2020 at 1:37 PM.
