Friday’s News and Notes

Scouring the interwebs as Eastern North Carolina is trying to reason with hurricane season:

**The threat of inclement weather from Hurricane Irene has led UNC officials to cancel the “Meet the Heels” event that was to be held Saturday. Since the season starts next weekend, the event will not be rescheduled.

**Inside Carolina has an interesting piece in which they asked members of the UNC football team who were some of the breakout players in training camp. On the offensive side, teammates had high praise for running back Gio Bernard, and on defense, juco transfer lineman Sylvester Williams was frequently mentioned. How Williams made it to UNC is also has a great story, if you have not read it.

**A certain unlinkable ACC blogger from ESPN actually has a lucid, spot-on piece about the crucial part of UNC’s schedule, which is the four-game stretch from late-October to mid-November that includes games at Clemson, Wake Forest, at NCSU, and at Virginia Tech.  With a relatively friendly opening slate of games, this run of four games, with three difficult road games, could well spell the difference in UNC’s season.

**As ridiculous as it seems, a number of pundits and supposed prognosticators have already started making bowl game projections for the upcoming season. A popular choice as a destination for UNC is the Champs Sports Bowl (as predicted by Phil Steele and Fox Sports, among others), which is intriguing since the Champs gets the ACC #3 pick. Given the upheaval in the UNC football program, either the selectors have a lot of faith in UNC’s personnel and resiliency, or the choices were made prior to Butch Davis’ dismissal. Either that or the Deems May-types who whined firing Davis sentenced UNC to a 3-9 season this year were demonstrating a bit of hyperbole. Or maybe all of those things are true.

In any case, in just eight days, UNC can finally get down to the business of playing actual football. Those of you who are in the hurricane-impacted areas of NC and all along the East Coast, please be safe this weekend.

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