This Is Potentially The Most Delicious ACC Portaling Of The Portal Era

If this happens, UNC partisans are going to lose their ever-loving minds.

As we’ve discussed previously, the ACC Triangle teams may be on the cusp of an historic inversion: NC State may push UNC to the third best team in the Triangle, which hasn’t happened since the early 1960’s.

New State coach Will Wade has recruited aggressively (no big surprise) and has a promising roster to start his first ACC season. He also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder which should liven things up. And while the latest potential development may not be due to said chip, it could add immensely to the rivalry between NC State and UNC.

That rivalry has been pretty one-sided for a long time, with Wolfpack Nation hating UNC with a passion. State fans merit a footnote in UNC’s academic fraud scandal since they uncovered Julius Peppers’ very weak transcript and publicized it and then added to that by torpedoing Michael McAdoo’s legal case against UNC by proving that he committed plagiarism.

For their part, Camp UNC has long insisted that it’s less a rivalry and more sort of Little Brother syndrome and most Tar Heel partisans simply don’t pay much attention to State.

That won’t be easy with Wade in Raleigh and it will be impossible if the latest rumor about portaling turns out to be true: that UNC’s Ven-Allen Lubin is seriously considering transferring to State.

This rumor led former UNC star Theo Pinson to post “Ain’t no damn way” on X and Elliot Cadeau’s mother posted an interesting response as well.

If this actually does happen, it’s a big shift locally and it’s sort of the Final Portal Frontier. State fans will be very happy, even though Lubin has never been more than a solid post presence, but UNC fans will be completely bent out of shape at the idea that anyone could ever even consider leaving Chapel Hill for Raleigh, much less doing it.

It’s going to juice that Triangle rivalry in a big way and if Wade does well while Hubert Davis continues to be mercurial, well, that’s likely to have major ramifications.