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Written by Michael Koh
The ACC-SEC Challenge is bringing back what basketball fans have been craving for years.
The matchups for the 2025 iteration of the challenge were revealed Thursday, and Carolina will travel to Rupp Arena to face Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats. While the matchup certainly isn’t new, the venue is: it will be the first time the two schools have played each other in an on-campus facility in more than a decade.
This is because of the CBS Sports Classic, one of a number of multi-team, non-tournament events which take place on neutral courts across the country. UNC and Kentucky are two of the four teams in the field and play each other based on the event’s rotation. Because they won’t face off in the Classic this year, that paved the way for the matchup in Lexington.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. UNC and Kentucky formerly were engaged in an annual home-and-home series before the advent of the CBS Sports Classic. The Wildcats in the Dean Dome or the Tar Heels in Rupp was always appointment television. I have no doubt this season’s matchup will get a nice spot in prime time.
College basketball’s obsession with neutral-site games in randomly-selected arenas has sadly made these games few and far between. Instead of raucous student sections and lines around the block, we’re presented with sanitized, made-for-TV events with courtside seats given to the highest bidder.
UNC’s schedule features a few such matchups. The Tar Heels will travel down to Fort Myers, FL for two games against St. Bonaventure and Michigan State during the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m sure you can feel the excitement.
Then, of course, there’s the CBS Sports Classic, which will see Carolina play Ohio State at State Farm Arena, home of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. That cavernous stadium will surely provide a better environment than Columbus or Chapel Hill could have.
The Tar Heels have reportedly agreed to a home-and-home with Georgetown for the next two seasons and will be hosting Kansas in an historic matchup at the Smith Center in November, so perhaps the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Could we finally realize that college basketball is better when it’s played in… college basketball arenas? In an era when the Final Four is now annually played in football stadiums with sightlines that require opera glasses, it may be foolish to believe in the triumph of logic over the almighty dollar.
But UNC will be playing in Rupp Arena this December. And for a college basketball purist, that’s about as good as it gets.
So let me dream, just for a little while.
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Featured image via Associated Press/Brynn Anderson
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