Even if the surroundings hadn’t been unfamiliar and different, even if practicing on the game field at Kenan Stadium – as North Carolina will do all season while its practice fields are being renovated – wasn’t odd enough, all you had to do was look around to see who wasn’t there.
So many familiar names, mainstays of the North Carolina football program over the past few seasons, all gone. This was true in the spring, when the real transition to this new and largely unproven roster began, but there’s always something about the first day of practices that newly drives home old realizations, and in this case it was both the place and the personnel.