More Than Meets The Eye

(For Robbie. I hope you enjoy this man. It's the only time you'll ever hear me talk good about them.)

Everybody knows that the University of North Carolina is one of the most dominant teams in college basketball history. If you wanted to be vain you could sum it up in just two words: Michael Jordan. But Tar Heel basketball is way more than that. It's 5 NCAA Division I National Championships. It's 17 ACC tournament titles and 27 ACC regular season titles. It's 41 times that they've gone dancing, and 18 times that they've danced their way into the Final Four. It's 1950 wins in just 98 seasons of basketball. But that's not all UNC should be known for anymore.

Tar Heel baseball has become one of the more dominant programs in college baseball. North Carolina only has 8 trips to Omaha to their name, but have been "back home" in each of the last 4 seasons. In 3 of those 4 seasons the Heels have made the Championship Series. Though they were unsuccessful, the fact they were there and show signs of being back for years to come, makes them a force to be reckoned with.

Okay so let's face it. North Carolina hasn't really done a whole lot in the gridiron department. They haven't won a bowl game since 2001 (Peach Bowl) and they haven't won an ACC title in 29 years. What they have done is hired and excellent coach/recruiter in Butch Davis, and put together two of the top recruiting classes in the nation over the past two years. They're 8-5 record was nothing to write home about, but it did get them their first bowl appearance since 2004 and has them on the rise for the near future in college football. And let's not forget, UNC football gave us one of the most important parts of the game: the forward pass.

North Carolina was the team of the 80's and half of the 90's in NCAA Lacrosse, making the tournament every year from 1980-1996. Though they haven't taken the crown since 1991 they are continually one of the top ranked teams in the nation, and the rivalry with Duke, definitely runs deep in this sport. In 2009 the Tar Heels posted a 12-6 record and eventually lost to the hated Dukies in the Quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament. That stellar season landed 5 of their players on the NCAA All-American team, and helped get the Tar Heels a recruiting class that looks to have them back at the top in 2010.

North Carolina won their first NCAA Men's Soccer Championship against the Indiana Hoosiers, in their first ever trip to the finals back in 2001. The Tar Heels made it back last season only to fall 1-0 to the Maryland Terrapins. The finals appearance was enough to bump the Heels to third in the national polls and, landed them a recruiting class that has UNC soccer primed as one of the favorites going into the 2009 season.

Make no mistake about it, Chapel Hill has, is, and always will be, a basketball town. But the athletes in these 4 sports have given the Tar Heel faithful something else to be proud of, when they aren't packed into the Dean Smith Center, watching Roy Williams work his magic.