Next year, the Tar Heels will play the return game with the Minnesota Golden Gophers in Minneapolis to begin the season. On Monday, the program announced that the game will be played a little bit earlier than expected in Week 1.
The game was originally scheduled to be a Saturday kick on August 31st of next year, but will now be a Thursday night kick in Huntington Bank Stadium. This meeting will come after the Tar Heels won the first game of the home-and-home with the Golden Gophers a few weeks ago 31-13 in Chapel Hill.
With the game being moved to Thursday night, the Tar Heels second weeknight opener in the last four years. It will be just the seventh time that the team will play a season opener on a day other than Saturday. Three prior games were played on a Thursday, including a historic top five matchup with No. 1 Pittsburgh back in 1982. The two most recent Thursday night games came back in 2013 and 2015 against South Carolina.