So we're going to go ahead with this ACC football season despite whatever warning signs and red flags are out there. That much is beyond clear at this point. It is inevitable. It is unstoppable.
Only hours after N.C. State had to push its opener at Virginia Tech back two weeks because the Wolfpack can't practice because of a COVID-19 outbreak, the university announced it was closing the dorms and sending everyone home, just as North Carolina did previously.
The ACC presses on with football regardless.
It's a measure of how desperate everyone in the ACC is to play that the postponement of that game was seen as an encouraging development. Both North Carolina coach Mack Brown and Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson said Wednesday that moving that game only made it more likely the season would be played.
"Seeing the NC State game being moved is a positive," Brown said. "People are still trying to make this craziness work out so we can play."
Brown's not wrong. Momentum continues to gather in the ACC despite the schedule shuffling, player protests, practice pauses, online classes and abandoned campuses, proceeding forward while making one concession after another.
Even if this is failing the Ian Malcolm test _ "Your (presidents) were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" _ it's clearly going to happen.
In just over two weeks, assuming Duke and Notre Dame and North Carolina and Syracuse don't run into the same problems, clearly a massive assumption, the ACC appears bound and determined to play football this fall.
The ACC gave itself a month of runway to make this decision, and when the Big Ten and Pac-12 pulled the plug, the ACC (like the Big 12 and SEC) made it clear it intended to use it. So it is.
But if what's happening at N.C. State prompted only a routine rescheduling instead of a rapid reassessment, nothing's going to stop the ACC now.
So what's it actually going to look like for the ACC and the rest of the Power Three-Fifths?
For one thing, the national picture is going to be awfully blurry. Nine teams in the AP Top 25 are waiting until spring, and 22 of the 51 players on the AP All-America teams are either being held out with their teammates or sitting out by choice. (Ten of the 51 are from the ACC.)
For another, it's going to look and sound very different. Not just the empty stands and absent bands, but the masked officials and the socially distanced sidelines. Brown also said he told his players during a scrimmage this week to look up into the empty Kenan Stadium stands and prepare themselves for that kind of game atmosphere.
"What we've said is the only certainty about this year is the uncertainty," Brown said. "Nobody knows. We don't know anything."
But there's also no question schools _ inside and outside the ACC _ are doing things they would not have done before in the desperate scramble to play these games.
On the same day N.C. State's opener had to be postponed, Wake Forest announced Campbell as its plus-one nonconference opponent. Campbell is only two years removed from being a nonscholarship program. It has only four games on its 2020 schedule since the Big South pushed football to the spring. It has played a total of two FBS opponents ever, Coastal Carolina and Troy, losing by a combined 66 points, and never a Power 5 team.
The last time Wake Forest played a Big South team, Presbyterian in 2017, it won 51-7. Liberty, in its final FCS season, beat 1-11 Baylor in 2017, but the rest of the Big South is a collective 0-5 against Power 5 opponents over the past three seasons by an aggregate 252-23. Charleston Southern lost four of those games, including 72-10 at South Carolina last season. The Buccaneers later beat Campbell by 10.
This is, on paper, a grotesque mismatch. Outside of a pandemic, it makes very little sense for Wake Forest and even less for Campbell.
Camels to the slaughter, as it says in the Bible.
The ACC presses on.
