Update: 2 ACC schools push season opener back
By: will-vandervort August 26, 2020

The start of the college football season is still 15 days away in the Atlantic Coast Conference, but two of its member institutions will reportedly push back their opening game.

According to Yahoo Sports, NC State’s season opener at Virginia Tech on Sept. 12 will be pushed back to Sept. 26, due to a recent outbreak of positive tests in Raleigh, in particular where the Wolfpack has reported 22 new positive cases for the COVID-19 virus in the athletic department.

“This is what we have been talking about in the last month or so about understanding: A, how important it is to get started… But, B, once you get started this type of thing can happen,” ACCN host Wes Durham said on the Packer & Durham Show Wednesday morning. “This is exactly the type of thing that can move a game from one week to the next and it can also move a game into a situation where another team cannot play.”

WRAL Sports Fan radio, the local ESPN affiliate in Raleigh, is reporting the NC State football program is among those affected by the recent outbreak and more than a dozen players were held out of last Saturday’s scrimmage due to COVID-19 protocols. The ACC’s protocols require student-athletes who come in contact with anyone who has tested positive for the coronavirus to be quarantined for 14 days.

NC State has since paused all athletic activities after the school identified seven new clusters on Monday and Tuesday.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services identifies a cluster as five or more positive cases that are deemed close proximity or location. On Tuesday, NC State added 63 more cases of the coronavirus, which were identified in seven student living facilities, both on and off campus.

According to WRAL, one of the clusters the school identified was at the Wolf Village student apartment complex on campus, which is where the freshmen on the football team are required to live.

“This is why this is going to be such a difficult proposition, assuming we can get to the starting point because I suspect this is not just an ACC thing, this is a college football thing for 2020,” ACCN host Mark Packer said. “I suspect we will see that a bunch assuming we can even have a season.

“There is a story even yesterday, outside the ACC footprint, with Oklahoma where they have seventeen COVID positive tests and Lincoln Riley talked about, ‘We had a position group that got completely wiped out from COVID.’ Now, if you have that during the season, hey, good luck! Do the best you can if you can play. This is going to be unlike anything we have ever seen.”

As a result of the recent outbreak, NC State has already announced it is suspending tickets for the 2020 football season. NC State athletics could lose up to $21 million dollars in revenue if no fans are permitted for the 2020 football season.

“What NC State has to think about is, ‘Can we do this in an environment that allows us to be successful?’ Right now, they are not sure they can with fans in the seats,” Durham said.

NC State’s football team has not practiced since last Saturday and with 17 days before kickoff their opener at Virginia Tech will reportedly be pushed back. NC State is not commenting at this time about the possibility of having the game moved, while the ACC declined to comment to WRAL about how it will handle postponing and rescheduling games this fall.

NC State and Virginia Tech both had scheduled open dates on Sept. 26, so there was opportunity to push the game back to that date.

This latest news, coupled with the fact Virginia is likely not going to find a replacement game for VMI in its season opener, means Virginia Tech will now open its season against in-state rival Virginia on Sept. 19 in The Commonwealth Cup. NC State will now open its season on the same day by hosting Wake Forest.

“Go back to the word flexible, a word we mentioned 400 times in the middle of the summer. Fans, players, coaches and administrators are going to have to be flexible even if this tries to get off the ground,” Packer said.

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