On Friday night in Charlotte, Maye picked up a haul of prestigious hardware - his awards for ACC Player of the Year, ACC Offensive Player of the Year, ACC Rookie of the Year and ACC Offensive Rookie of the Year. It has been a tightrope act down to the wire time and again for these Tar Heels, as the redshirt freshman Maye has emerged as one of the star attractions in college football. UNC went a school-record 6-0 in road games and ultimately clinched the division crown with two games to spare in the regular season by pulling off a 36-34 escape of Wake Forest, at the time its fourth straight victory that required a second-half comeback. Still, even with the dampening downturn of back-to-back losses at home to Georgia Tech and rival NC State, a charmed season has carried the Tar Heels to conference championship weekend. Clemson went an unbeaten 8-0 in ACC league play, but was steamrolled by Notre Dame - the Fighting Irish administered a similar pounding to UNC - and rival South Carolina knocked off the Tigers last week in the regular-season finale. 23 in the College Football Playoff rankings and No. The Tar Heels limp into Saturday night on a two-game losing skid, having slipped to No. Clemson and Florida State (five appearances) largely have owned the Atlantic Division side of the equation. Virginia Tech (six appearances) and Georgia Tech (four appearances) most frequently have represented the Coastal in the conference title game. The ACC is dissolving its divisional format next season, which makes UNC the final champion of the Coastal Division. That’s what we want.” The field at Bank of America Stadium is set for Saturday night's championship game. But everybody in this league is trying to get to the standard that Clemson is. Last year was a little bit of a difference, because we had two different teams playing for the conference championship. Everybody’d love to recruit like them, and everybody’d like to win like them. Everybody’d love to have a commitment like theirs to football. “Everybody’s trying to get facilities like theirs. “They’ve been the standard in this league,” Brown said of what Clemson has become under Swinney’s watch. Those Crimson Tide teams won eight outright SEC championships in nine years from 1971-79. On the Power Five level, Bear Bryant’s Alabama juggernaut casts a considerable shadow as the last team to collect seven outright conference titles during an eight-year span. ![]() The Tigers will be playing in their record ninth ACC championship game, and attempting to win their seventh title across the last eight years. Meanwhile, Clemson has extended its remarkable run under coach Dabo Swinney. It’s the 18th edition of the ACC football championship game and UNC is making its second appearance. I feel like that’d be a testament to Coach Brown coming back to this program, turning it around, and just putting it in the right direction.” “The last three or four years, we’ve been putting in work for this opportunity, and to be able to come out with a victory would be huge. “For this athletic department, for this team, for Coach, it would mean the world to win this championship,” Downs said. The league was made up of only seven schools in those days, and Mack Brown was a 29-year-old offensive coordinator at Iowa State, his eventual Hall of Fame coaching career still in its relative infancy back then.įorty-two years later, the Tar Heels (9-3), now of Drake Maye and Co., can claim the conference crown and secure a berth in the Orange Bowl by toppling Clemson (10-2) on Saturday night in the ACC championship game at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C. Running back Amos Lawrence and sack master Lawrence Taylor, two of UNC’s all-time greats, starred on the 1980 team that won the ACC under former coach Dick Crum. The Tar Heels have reached the doorstep of delivering a golden achievement that, either way, would be decades-in-the-making and thus a long time coming. No need for an apology from Downs, who soon was smiling and having a laugh during that moment, because the point remains all the same. “What, 32 years ago since 1980? Oh, that’s like 42 - 42, I’m 10 years off! My bad. ![]() “It would mean everything,” Downs said this week. Asked about the significance of what’s at stake this weekend and the potential impact as the North Carolina football program seeks to capture its first ACC title since 1980, Josh Downs immediately launched into the historical context.īut quantifying and qualifying that context tripped up the speedy receiver just as quickly.
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