No, not in this case. Unfortunately we were on a tight schedule and had to make a last minute change to the hydra node version we were using. That change included updated validators, so the logic I wrote to open the heads ahead of time was no longer working.
We got it updated, but ran into some issues. That happened at about 2am the night before qualifiers, so we haven't done an in depth analysis of the issue yet to really identify what it was.
But, in theory, there is nothing preventing this from happening "on chain" except for time.