Because the last 12 months haven't been all that kind to North Carolina fans, and because the coming years probably won't be either, I figured I'd be nice in this space today and talk about the best football UNC has produced.

So basically, the Heels were at their best in the 1920s-1940s, in Lawrence Taylor's time, and at the end of Mack Brown's tenure. This is consistent, actually, with a lot of ACC teams. Programs like North Carolina, Duke, Maryland, etc., established themselves in the period from the 1920s to the early-1950s, then vanished from the face of the earth when the SEC emerged as the nation's pre-eminent football conference in the mid-1950s. The ACC began to have its moments again beginning in the early-1980s, but obviously it hasn't been quite as consistently strong as that other southern conference.