Duke Hopes To Renew In-State ACC Rivalry With NC State in the Future
By Chris Brown
The four Atlantic Coast Conference programs located in the state of North Carolina are looking to renew their football rivalries with each other in the near future. Duke, North Carolina State, UNC Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest have all had memorable games and historic rivalries throughout the years not only in basketball, but football as well.
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ACC scheduling requires teams to play everyone in their division, so Duke-UNC in the Coastal Division and Wake Forest-NC State in the Atlantic Division will play annually. Each team must also play two cross-divisional games each season, one against a permanent rival in the opposing division and the other against an opponent that rotates each year. The permanent cross-division games between NC schools are Duke-Wake Forest and UNC-NC State. This set up leaves out Duke vs. NC State and UNC vs. Wake Forest until they are matched in the rotating game outside of the division. In the past, all four of NC’s ACC schools played against each other annually.
But, UNC and Wake Forest just signed an agreement to play non-conference games in 2019 in Winston-Salem and 2021 in Chapel Hill. For those seasons, both UNC and WF will play against each ACC team in the state. The split into football divisions and conference expansion have made scheduling between North Carolina’s ACC schools much harder. Until this contract, Wake Forest and North Carolina weren’t scheduled to play again in the ACC until 2022 after competing every season from 1944-2004. UNC and Wake Forest are the first two ACC schools to agree to this type of scheduling, but it has been tossed around in other conferences like the SEC and it’s expected that other ACC schools will join soon.
Duke and North Carolina State are hoping to come to a similar agreement to play non-conference rivalry games. Duke won the last match-up against the Wolfpack at Wallace Wade in 2013, but the two schools aren’t scheduled to play again until 2020 in Raleigh. The Blue Devils desire to renew their in-state rivalry with NC State and the two schools have discussed playing non-conference games against each other. Duke senior associate athletics director Gerald Harrison has also said, “We would be interested in exploring non-conference games with conference opponents”.
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However, scheduling for the Blue Devils in the coming years will be difficult for a non-conference match-up between Duke and NC State and may require the schools to break existing contracts with other programs. All ACC teams have 4 required non-conference games: 1 can be against an FCS team and 3 must be against FBS teams, at least one from a Power 5 conference.
Duke already has upcoming series scheduled against cross-town rival North Carolina Central (FCS), Notre Dame (the Fighting Irish are independent but required to play a certain number of ACC teams each year, will face Duke in 2016, 2019, and 2020), Army (2015-2018), Northwestern (2015-2018), Baylor (2017-2018), Middle Tennessee, and more, so it will be very difficult to schedule a game in the near future between the Blue Devils.