The North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball program is the intercollegiate men's basketball team of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels have won five NCAA Tournament Championships (1957, 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009) and were retroactively named the national champions by the Helms Athletic Foundation for their undefeated season in 1924. North Carolina's five NCAA Tournament Championships are tied for third-most all-time. They have also won 17 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament titles and 29 Atlantic Coast Conference regular season titles (including an Atlantic Coast Conference record 19 outright Regular Season Championships). The program has produced many notable players who went on to play professionally, including Michael Jordan, and many assistant coaches who went on to become head coaches elsewhere.
The Tar Heels are currently #3 on the Division I all-time wins list. From the Tar Heels' first season in 1910–11 through the 2012–13 season, the Tar Heels have amassed a .737 all-time winning percentage (second highest all-time), winning 2,090 games and losing 745 games in 103 seasons. The Tar Heels also have the most consecutive 20-win seasons, with 31 seasons from the 1970–71 season through the 2000–2001 season. On March 2, 2010, North Carolina became the second college basketball program to reach 2,000 wins in its history. The Tar Heels are one of only three Division I Men's Basketball programs to have ever achieved 2,000 victories. The Tar Heels have appeared in the NCAA finals nine times, have participated in a record 18 NCAA Final Fours, have made it into the NCAA tournament 44 times (second-most all-time), and have amassed a total of 109 victories (second most all-time). North Carolina also won the National Invitation Tournament in 1971, has appeared in two NIT Finals, and has made five appearances in the NIT Tournament. Additionally, the team has been the number one seed in the NCAA Tournament 14 times, the latest being in 2012 (most #1 seeds all-time), has been ranked in the Top 25 in the AP Poll 808 weeks all time (#1 all-time), has beaten #1 teams a record 12 times, have the most consecutive 20-win seasons with 31, and have the most consecutive top-3 ACC finishes with 37. North Carolina has ended the season ranked in the Top-25 of the AP Poll 43 times and in the Top-25 of the Coaches' Poll 44 times. Further, the Tar Heels have finished the season ranked #1 in the AP Poll 5 times and ranked #1 in Coaches' Poll 5 times. In 2008, the Tar Heels received the first unanimous preseason #1 ranking in the history of either the Coaches' Poll or the AP Poll. In 2012, ESPN ranked North Carolina #1 on its list of the 50 most successful programs of the past 50 years.
All of these streaks ended in the 2001–02 season, when the Tar Heels finished 8–20 on the season under coach Matt Doherty. They also finished tied for 7th in conference play, behind Florida State and Clemson—only their second losing conference record ever (the first being in the ACC's inaugural season).
Additionally, the Tar Heels have an active 56 consecutive home game winning streak against Clemson, who has never beaten the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill since the first game between the two teams in 1926 at Chapel Hill (as of the 2011–12 season). The 56th consecutive win is an NCAA record in a head-to-head matchup. Until the 2010 ACC Tournament, North Carolina was the only program to have never played a Thursday game in the ACC Tournament since it expanded to a four-day format. UNC is still the only men's basketball program to have played just once on Thursday of the ACC Tournament.
Read more about North Carolina Tar Heels Men's Basketball: By The Numbers, Carolina Basketball Museum, Milestone Wins, UNC Junior Varsity Basketball Team, Records, Home Venues
Famous quotes containing the words north, carolina, tar, heels, men and/or basketball:
“Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints
Of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“I hear ... foreigners, who would boycott an employer if he hired a colored workman, complain of wrong and oppression, of low wages and long hours, clamoring for eight-hour systems ... ah, come with me, I feel like saying, I can show you workingmen’s wrong and workingmen’s toil which, could it speak, would send up a wail that might be heard from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; and should it unite and act, would shake this country from Carolina to California.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)