North Carolina Tar Heels Football (2024)

FAQs

Why did N.C. get their nickname as the Tar Heels? ›

The moniker is rooted in the state's earliest history, derived from the production of naval stores – tar, pitch and turpentine – extracted from the vast pine forests of the state. Early explorers from Jamestown pointed out the possibilities for naval stores production along the Chowan River.

UNC & The Rankings

Carolina was ranked in for four weeks that season concluding at No. 19. *UNC has been ranked No. 1 just once before, in 1948.

UNC and N.C. State have deep rivalries going back over 100 years, reinforced through their Atlantic Coast Conference membership that ensures they play each other routinely.

In 1924, during a rough year for the football team, Huggins decided that UNC needed an animal mascot similar to N.C. State's wolf or Georgia's bulldog. The idea for using a ram came from the nickname for star Tar Heel fullback Jack Merritt, known as the "Battering Ram."

Leloudis notes that many Confederate veterans from North Carolina wore a “Tar Heel” as a symbol of state pride during Reconstruction. The other origin story comes from North Carolina's booming turpentine business in the 18th century.

As the birthplace of flying, North Carolina has a special place in aviation history. At Kitty Hawk, a little seaside community on the Outer Banks, Orville and Wilbur Wright accomplished the first powered flight in December 1903.

After North Carolina missed the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2010, he just couldn't. Last year was only the fourth time the Tar Heels did not make the tournament since 1975. Between the transfers and returners, nearly every player on this UNC team sat out of the tournament last year.

1 seed (1982, 1993, 2005, 2009 and 2017). Carolina is making its 53^rd NCAA Tournament appearance, second in history behind Kentucky's 61. The Tar Heels are 131-49 all-time in the NCAA Tournament. UNC has won 131 NCAA Tournament games (most in history) and played in 180 (second-most behind Kentucky's 184).

Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are known as “Tar Heels,” but they are not the only ones. A Tar Heel is really anyone from the entire state of North Carolina, which is also known as the Tar Heel State.

What the heck is a tar heel? ›

To call someone a “rosin heel” or “tar heel” was to imply that they worked in a lowly trade. During the Civil War, North Carolina soldiers flipped the meaning of the term and turned an epithet into an accolade. They called themselves “tar heels” as an expression of state pride.

Head cheerleader Vic Huggins noticed a lack of school spirit for the Tar Heels. So instead of making the school's mascot a giant foot with black muck on the heel, he suggested that the team make its mascot a ram. The idea was based on UNC's star football player, Jack Merritt, who was nicknamed, the “Battering Ram.”

NORTH CAROLINA: In the early 1600's, the area was referred to in some English papers as Carolina and was thought to be named for Charles I of England. Later, about 1663, the name Carolina was definitely applied by those who had received a grant to the land from Charles II, and so it was named in his honor.

The Tar River gets its name from North Carolina's history as a naval stores colony, where our dense longleaf pine forests provided much of the tar, turpentine, and pitch needed for shipbuilding and transporting goods throughout the colonies and abroad.

"Tar Heel" emerged as a derogatory term for the enslaved people and other poor, barefoot North Carolinians who produced the products and thus had pine resin or tar stuck to the bottoms of their feet ("rosin heels" was an earlier version of the term).

North Carolina held its secession convention on May 20, 1861 and joined the Confederacy the next day. The groundwork for this decision, laid in the early part of the century had at last culminated in a complete rending of our union.