On Tuesday afternoon, the last missing piece of the 2025-26 North Carolina Tar Heels men’s basketball schedule was put into place, as the ACC slate for this coming season was released. Starting with hosting Florida State just before the New Year, Carolina will play an 18-game schedule, wrapping up with the traditional season-ending Duke game, this one in Durham on March 7th.
This is the first year that the ACC is returning
to an 18-game schedule, down from 20 in the previous couple years. With 18 teams in the league and hoping not to lose home-and-home series like UNC-Duke, the ACC somewhat controversially changed the format of the schedule, which is now implemented this season. Under the new format, teams will have one primary home-and-home partner, and play another team twice, which changes depending on the season. Teams will play 14 of the other 15 teams once, and will forgo a matchup with one team entirely.
In addition to the primary partner of Duke, Carolina’s other home-and-home series this year will come against Syracuse, playing in Chapel Hill on February 2nd and on the road on February 21st. This season, the team the Tar Heels will not be facing off against at all is Boston College. That change in schedule has a chance to wreak havoc on some long-running series at some point in the future, but at least historically, not playing the Eagles isn’t missing much.
This year’s slate will mark UNC’s first visits to all of Cal, SMU, and Stanford for conference matchups. The Tar Heels got the conference’s three newest teams all at home last season, and this year they’ll have to head out west for all three. The two California games are back to back, as they’ll play at Stanford on January 13th or 14th, and then at Cal on the 17th. The game at SMU will come earlier that month, as they’ll head to Dallas on January 3rd.
As mentioned with the Stanford game, the date of every game is not completely locked in, as the television channels are most likely keeping their options open. However, all of those games are just a choice between a Tuesday and Wednesday game, so there’s nothing that will alter the makeup of the schedule that drastically.
UNC will face two one-day turnarounds between games. On January 31st, they’re set to play Georgia Tech on the road before returning home for Syracuse at home on February 2nd. Then, after the road game against the Orange on February 21st, they’ll get just a day off before returning home to face Louisville on the 23rd. Both of those instances being home/road splits isn’t ideal, but those aren’t the worst possible trips in between.
After last season’s disappointment and barely reaching the NCAA Tournament, Hubert Davis and the Tar Heels will feature a pretty different roster in search of a rebound season. We still have a little while to go before the regular season, but now the Heels can begin to fully prepare for the tests they’ll face this season.
