UNC, NC State football searching for end to ACC football title drought. Is this the year?

Among the coaches and players who attended the ACC’s annual preseason football kickoff, the talking points were largely the same as ever last week in Charlotte. There’s a familiar cadence to this time of year, every year, on the college football calendar, when hope and cliches abound.

Some of the main takeaways: Most teams, if not all, think they’ll be better this season than last. New coaches, either of the head or assistant variety, are making a difference. Transfers have filled holes. Veterans have figured it out. Team chemistry is much improved.

This will be the year.

No, really.

So goes the annual talk with the arrival of college football’s talking season. If there was a difference this year, though, among North Carolina’s four ACC schools, it was this: There was considerably more attention surrounding N.C. State, and far less than usual surrounding North Carolina.

Since Mack Brown returned to UNC in 2018, the Tar Heels have often been a trendy pick to challenge the ACC’s power(s)-that-be (Clemson, usually) for conference supremacy. Brown, after all, led the program to national relevance during his first go-around in Chapel Hill, in the 1990s, and came back with plenty of talk of how he’d do it again.

UNC’s recruiting matched the early gusto of Mack 2.0. At least it did for a while, anyway.

The on-the-field results? Not so much.

The Tar Heels will open their season about a month from now, at Minnesota, without the kind of expectations that have perhaps saddled them in recent seasons. This year, it’s N.C. State’s turn to handle the hype and whatever burden comes with it — though Dave Doeren, approaching his 12th season as State’s head coach, hardly attempted to downplay the expectations last week.

Part of his messaging: Good is no longer good enough.

“We’re one of five programs over the last four years that have won eight or more games in college football,” said Doeren who, like Brown, came prepared with statistics to defend his team’s recent record. “We’ve sustained a level of competitive greatness that not many people have been able to do.

“With that being said, we want to win a championship.”

UNC, NC State share drought

For both State and Carolina that has been the elusive prize for years, if not decades. For two programs that despise one another, with fans who hold each other in a rare kind of contempt, the Wolfpack and Tar Heels have more in common in football than either would like to admit.

They both, for instance, have a tendency to falter when the expectations rise. Some of their best seasons in recent memory, meanwhile, have come when supporters least might have expected it. They’ve both traded seasons and stretches of time of being the trendy “it” program — the one that appears most poised for a breakthrough.

And yet after all of that, there’s this: Neither one has won the ACC in more than 40 years.

The Tar Heels last won a conference championship in 1980. N.C. State last won one in 1979.

Then, like now, they simply traded spaces — State winning the ACC one year and Carolina the next. There have been many seasons since when one or the other looked the part to win it again, only for fate or (mediocre, or worse) football to intervene; seasons when the talent was there, and especially the quarterbacking, but not the breaks or fortitude.

Still, it seems almost statistically impossible for the state’s two largest ACC schools to go so long without a conference championship in football. It feels like one or the other would’ve at least stumbled into one after all these years, almost by luck if nothing else.

When UNC won the ACC in 1980, it was a seven-school conference in football. Since then, nine schools have won at least a share of a conference championship. Wake Forest won it outright in 2006. Duke shared it with Virginia in 1989.

Indeed, Florida State and Clemson have often dominated the league — FSU from when it joined in the 1992 through much of the 2000s; Clemson since — and that’s how Brown last week explained the Tar Heels’ long conference championship drought. In the same breath, he said, “We need to do better.”

‘We want to be the best’

The first five seasons of Brown’s second tenure at UNC have been defined by strong quarterback performances, but also missed chances and unfulfilled expectations. Sam Howell and Drake Maye left Chapel Hill as two of the best quarterbacks in school history, yet their years at UNC will be remembered as much for lost opportunity as their dazzling highlights.

UNC has entered the top 15 of the national rankings in each of the past four seasons, but finished only one of them (in 2020) as a ranked team. That’s also the last time the Tar Heels finished among the top 25 of the final College Football Playoff rankings. The expectations have been there, “but our team hasn’t handled them that well,” Brown said.

“And it really bothers me. And we’ve got to get where we need to go, and then we’ve got to win when we get there, to expect us to be good enough to be there. And we haven’t done that yet.”

For once, Brown and his program will enter a season without the familiar buzz. That belongs, now, to N.C. State, with its revamped offense, led by incoming transfer quarterback Grayson McCall, and a defense that lost its best playmaker in Payton Wilson but not, the hope goes, its culture or identity. Like UNC, though, the Wolfpack hasn’t exactly handled expectations.

State has finished the past four seasons inside the final College Football Playoff ranking, and has been in the final Associated Press top 25 in two of the past three seasons. The one year that didn’t happen came in 2022, when the Wolfpack started the season ranked 13th and entered the top 10, only to finish unranked in the final AP poll.

Given all the arrivals on offense and the standard State has established on defense, it’s hardly a surprise that the Wolfpack has become a trendy preseason pick to win the ACC, or at least make a serious run. The surprise, though, might be if the breakthrough actually happens. It has been a long wait for both State and Carolina over the past 40 years.

For both, an ACC championship continues to be elusive.

It didn’t happen with Philip Rivers or Russell Wilson at N.C. State, or with Howell or Maye at North Carolina. Mario Williams left State without a conference championship. So did Julius Peppers at UNC. Mack Brown hasn’t won one as UNC’s head coach. Doeren hasn’t won one in more than a decade in Raleigh.

“What we did last year and the year before and the year before is good,” he said last week. “Winning nine games is good.

“We don’t want to be ‘good,’ we want to be the best at what we do.”

The talk is there, at least. And yet the talk, and expectations, haven’t often lacked for State or Carolina. They both enter 2024 searching for the same thing: an end to a long streak of football futility.