Playing a Team Sight Unseen
Of the 31 in-state players on Wake Forest’s roster, many no doubt dreamed of playing for North Carolina. The rest probably dreamed about playing against the Tar Heels.
The latter group will finally get its chance Saturday when, for the first time since 2007, Wake will play North Carolina. I’m sure most of you agree how screwed up it is that two schools who played each other 64 straight seasons from 1943 through 2007 have now gone three straight seasons without settling things on the gridiron. So I’ll save that rant for another day, and instead highlight coach Jim Grobe’s thoughts on the difficulty of playing a team, and an arch-rival at that, that he has so little first-hand information on.
Suffice it to say there will be a whole lot of feeling out going on in the early stages of Saturday’s game set for 3:30 at Kenan Stadium.
“I think sometimes when you play a team every year, you have kind of a feel for what their staff thinks about you,’’ Grobe explained. “You’ve got an idea what’s going to happen during the course of the game. You’ve got an idea if they’re going to be really aggressive in certain situations or kind of play it safe – things like that. That’s something we don’t have any idea with with North Carolina and down the road with Notre Dame.
“I think what it does is you just put together the best plan that you’ve got and you need to be a little light on your feet when the game starts because you’re starting to figure out what their thoughts are about us. Of course the flip side about that is they don’t know about us very well either. So it’ll be a little bit of a hit-and-miss kind of thing, I think, on Saturday.’‘