UNC Football: The Tar Heels will face Oregon in the Holiday Bowl

Dec 4, 2022 - 8:56 PM

Despite the rough ending to the season, the 9-4 Tar Heels still easily qualified for a bowl game, and on Sunday they found out they’ll be packing up and going to California to play in the Holiday Bowl. In it, the Tar Heels will face the Oregon Ducks. The game will be played December 28th at 8 PM and be broadcast nationally on Fox.

The ACC and Holiday Bowl are hoping the third time’s the charm for this new arrangement. Prior to the 2020 season, the two announced their affiliation to start, however, thanks to Covid in 2020 and Covid issues with UCLA in 2021, a bowl game with the ACC has yet to be played under the arrangement.

It’ll be the fourth year in a row the Tar Heels have made a bowl game, going 1-2 so far during this run. It’ll also be the first time Carolina has played a bowl game in California, and their first bowl game in the Pacific time zone since the 1998 Vegas Bowl, a 20-13 win over San Diego State in Carl Torbush’s last bowl game.

Their opponents for the game, the Oregon Ducks, just missed out on playing in the Pac 12 Championship thanks to tiebreaker rules that sent Utah instead. The tiebreaker resulted when the Ducks lost a 21 point lead to their in-state rival, Oregon State, in a 38-34 defeat during Thanksgiving weekend. The Ducks enter the Holiday Bowl at 9-3, 7-2 in the Pac 12, and have wins over UCLA, Utah, and BYU this season.

If Carolina can get their red zone woes figured out, this figures to be a real shoot out. The Ducks have failed to score at least 20 points once, in the season opening loss to Georgia, and besides the 20-17 win over Utah have scored at least 30 points in all of their other games. They’ve also routinely given up more than 30 points.

This will be the first meeting ever between the two schools.

The game will be played at the home of the San Diego Padres, tickets are on sale now, and note that the ACC side will be Carolina’s side of the field.