Members of the OSU football team huddle around coach Urban Meyer during the first day of fall practice Aug. 4 at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center in Columbus. Credit: Tim Moody / Lantern sports editor

Members of the OSU football team huddle around coach Urban Meyer during the first day of fall practice Aug. 4 at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center in Columbus.
Credit: Tim Moody / Lantern sports editor

Two potential Ohio State football games have ended before they were ever started.

OSU’s scheduled home-and-home series with the University of North Carolina, originally set for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, has been cancelled, according to OSU associate athletic director Martin Jarmond.

Jarmond, who handles most of OSU’s football scheduling, confirmed the cancellation to The Lantern, saying that it was a mutual decision between both schools, based upon the switch to a nine-game in-conference schedule in the Big Ten and other scheduling changes underway in the ACC.

“We worked with UNC to provide both us and them some scheduling flexibility with the things going on in the Big Ten and some things that they were doing in the ACC,” Jarmond said. “We tried to make it work, but we couldn’t get it done.”

With games cancelled in both 2017 and 2018, Jarmond said OSU will fill the two holes in the schedule left by the Tar Heels sooner rather than later.

“We’re going to have something very soon with that game in ’17 and that game in ’18,” Jarmond said. “We’ve been working with other non-conference schools to get those games scheduled.”

When the Big Ten made the change to create a nine-game in-conference schedule, Jarmond knew that scheduling issues, such as this one, were bound to arise.

“I wouldn’t say you ‘expect’ a series to have to be cancelled, but going to the nine games did create some flux,” Jarmond said. “You know going in that you have to re-adjust and re-calibrate your schedule and you never hope that a series is going to cancel, but we knew with the changes in the Big Ten that it was going to be in flux trying to schedule.”

Looking at further future non-conference schedules for OSU, the Buckeyes are still set to face the University of Oklahoma in Columbus in 2017 after a road matchup in 2016 and Texas Christian University away in 2018, before TCU heads back to Columbus the following year.

The Buckeyes are set to kick off their 2014 season against Navy at noon on Aug. 30 at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.