Written by MICHAEL KOH
As the ACC devolves into nonsense, UNC and NC State are taking matters into their own hands.
Wednesday’s announcement of a two-year, two-game series between the Tar Heels and Wolfpack sent a clear message: the fans have had it with the league. With these two games in Greensboro being classified as non-conference contests, it also sets groundwork in place for the series to live on should the schools be separated in a future conference realignment scramble.
Carolina and NC State’s rivalry existed well before the ACC came into the picture. The first meeting on record dates back to Feb. 22, 1913, a year before the start of World War I and 40 years before the ACC’s inception. From 1919 onward, the two teams always met twice a year — until the ACC bit off more than it could chew. With an expanded conference and a compressed conference schedule, the two teams met only once during the 2025-26 season. (NC State bears much of the blame for this, being the deciding vote to allow Cal, Stanford and SMU to invade the league)
The ACC’s transition from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the All Coast Conference, plus similar moves being made in the Big Ten and SEC, made college sports feel less about the fans and more about suits, boardrooms and manufactured hype. Why on earth would fans of Penn State rather see a game against Washington than, say, Pittsburgh?
Regional rivalries are dying left and right. In football, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State haven’t met since 2023, after which the Sooners left the Big 12 for the deeper coffers of the SEC (thank goodness OU was able to schedule a home-and-home with Clemson in 2035 and 2036, though). Similar to the setup with NC State in basketball, UNC and Wake Forest staged a series of non-conference football games outside of the ACC’s normal model in 2019 and 2021. And that was before the league’s latest expansion!
When discussing the Greensboro game against the Wolfpack, new UNC head coach Michael Malone had this to say: “The fans have spoken. The administrators have spoken. The legislators have spoken. This game matters. This game means something.”
In many ways, Greensboro is the perfect locale for the game. It first hosted the two teams in 1970, and they’ve met there 13 times since. It’s a stage which holds mythical importance to both programs, with the Tar Heels and Wolfpack combining to win 10 ACC Tournaments in Greensboro Coliseum. Malone even joked that the arena (now known by the garishly corporate name of “First Horizon Coliseum”) should be renamed the Dean Smith Center, due to the legendary coach’s run of success there.
The ACC Tournament will return to Greensboro this spring and in the spring of 2029, but the event’s recent departure from “Tournament Town” for the sleeker venues in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. was yet another disheartening development for nostalgic fans. As was the tournament moving up a day, abandoning its traditional Sunday afternoon timeslot for the championship game in favor of Saturday night.
If Carolina and NC State fans can ignore the Dec. 15 date on the calendar, the frosty temperatures outside that evening and, yes, even the new arena name, perhaps they imagine that it’s yet another thrilling three-day weekend at the Coliseum with a tournament title on the line. Maybe we can dust off the Raycom TV graphics package for the game, too.
It’s hard to get Tar Heels and Wolfpackers to agree on anything, yet both are so fed up with the ACC’s wheeling and dealing that they came together for this common cause. And for that, we say: Thank you, fans!
Featured image via Chapel Hill Media Group/Todd Melet
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