As Tar Heel Blog’s own David wrote about recently, there are quite a number of North Carolina Tar Heels teams wither still in or soon to start play in their sports’ respective NCAA Tournaments. While there’s a couple like basketball and soccer that have become the university’s most famous teams, UNC on the whole is a pretty overall good athletic program.
Eight different Tar Heel program have won official NCAA national championships over the years, and two others have made it as far as the championship round
of their various tournaments. UNC’s overall total of 52 — which hopefully could be higher in a couple weeks — is the eighth most of any Division I school.
With so many Carolina teams currently in action in their respective seasons and/or NCAA Tournaments, that got me thinking. As mentioned, UNC has won a ton of national championships, but not every sport has reached the mountaintop. With that in mind, I wanted to ask for today’s question of the day: what Tar Heel program would you most like to see win a national championship for the first time?
An answer that I would expect to see a lot of people say is a fairly obvious one: football. It certainly makes sense for that to be an answer. For one, college football is just the most watched and most popular college sport, and football is the most popular sport in the country. There’s a certain cache that comes with having a really good football team. What often also follows is money. Football being the most popular sport can have a big monetary effect on a school that helps in ways sporting and not. It’s a good answer.
That being said, I personally am going to look elsewhere, just because I don’t want to say the obvious. As I’ve mentioned before in these posts, baseball is my personal favorite sport, so the Diamond Heels finally getting over the hump at the Men’s College World Series would be extremely fun to watch.
As for a somewhat off the wall answer, I’ll also go with women’s volleyball. In recent years, the NCAA Women’s Volleyball Tournament has somewhat exploded in popularity. UNC’s team has made that version of the big dance somewhat regularly, but they haven’t been particularly been a threat to make a run at a championship. Volleyball is such a wildly fun sport to watch and I really wish that the Tar Heels can someday be near the top of the college game.
Those are my answers, but what about you? What sport do you next want to see UNC win its first ever national championship in?
