CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina men’s basketball team plays host to the College of Charleston in the 2020-21 season opener on Wednesday, November 25, the evening before Thanksgiving.
The season opener is the first of 27 regular-season games, a schedule reduced by four contests due to the pandemic. This will be the fewest regular-season games scheduled since UNC played 27 in 2005-06.
The schedule includes 20 games against Atlantic Coast Conference opponents, three games in Asheville, N.C., in the Maui Invitational (November 30-December 2), the ACC-Big Ten Challenge at Iowa on December 8, the CBS Sports Classic vs. Ohio State in Cleveland (December 19) and two non-conference home games (College of Charleston and December 12 vs. Elon).
Carolina begins ACC play on December 22 at NC State. This is the first time UNC has opened conference play against the Wolfpack since the 2005-06 season. It’s the first time the Tar Heels and Wolfpack are scheduled to play in November or December since the teams met in the Big Four Tournament in Greensboro, N.C., on Nov. 30, 1979.
The Tar Heels play home-and-home series against Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Miami, NC State and Syracuse; home games only against Louisville, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest; and play away games only vs. Boston College, Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh and Virginia.
“It is a difficult and challenging schedule to say the least,” says head coach Roy Williams. “We have a young team with a number of freshmen who are going to get a lot of playing time, and those are the type teams that you’d like to have some scrimmages and exhibition games that none of us have this season. But that’s the world we live in.”
“The non-conference schedules includes Iowa, who will probably be picked to win the Big Ten, in Iowa City, and Ohio State in Cleveland. The Maui Invitational has a field that I don’t know who I’d like to play. The ACC schedule has us playing twice against teams that all return a lot of players and likely will be projected to finish in the top half of the league, so we didn’t catch a break there. So it’s a challenging schedule, but everybody has that and we just have to play well on game nights. If we do, then we’ll have a really good basketball team.”
The ACC Tournament is March 9-13 in Washington, D.C.
Per Release