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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
ACC schools Virginia and NC State announced Wednesday they would play a home-and-home series in football that will not count as an official conference game.
The schools will play in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Sept. 6, 2025, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2026.
This marks the second time in recent years that a pair of ACC rivals have scheduled a nonconference series. Wake Forest and North Carolina scheduled games in 2019 and 2021 to keep alive a longtime rivalry that had been off the regular league schedule following conference expansion.
Beginning in 2023, the ACC scrapped division play in an effort to have member schools play each other more frequently, but the league also expanded to 17 teams, adding SMU, Stanford and Cal, for the 2024 season.
Virginia and NC State have played each other 60 times since their first meeting in 1904, however the rivalry diminished in frequency beginning in 2005. They’d faced off just seven times since and weren’t scheduled to play again until 2027.
While the SEC, which expanded to 16 teams starting this season, has toyed with the idea of moving from playing eight to nine conference games in the future, Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson, the chair of the ACC’s coaches committee, said Tuesday the ACC had no intentions of changing its eight-game model.
