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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
ACC schools Virginia and North Carolina State announced Wednesday they will play a home-and-home football series that will not count as an official conference game.
The two schools will play on September 6, 2025 in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in 2026 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This is the second time in recent years that the ACC rivals have scheduled a nonconference series. Wake Forest and North Carolina had scheduled games in 2019 and 2021 to keep alive a longtime rivalry that had been removed from the regular league schedule due to conference expansion.
Starting in 2023, the ACC eliminated divisional play in order to increase the frequency of competition between member schools, but the league expanded to 17 teams in the 2024 season with the addition of SMU, Stanford, and California.
Virginia and North Carolina State have played each other 60 times since they first met in 1904, but their rivalries have become less frequent since 2005. Since then, the two schools have faced off just seven times, and he doesn't plan to play again until 2027.
The SEC, which expanded to 16 teams starting this season, is considering the idea of moving from eight to nine conference games in the future, but Wake Forest coach Dave, who is chairman of the ACC's coaches committee, said Clawson said Tuesday that the ACC made the following decisions: We have no intention of changing the eight-game model.
