Keeping It Heel
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UNC Football Included in Post-Spring Top 25 Rankings

By Jordan Falls

CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA - AUGUST 27: Drake Maye #10 of the North Carolina Tar Heels takes the field for his first series as the team's starting quarterback against the Florida A&M Rattlers during the first half of their game at Kenan Memorial Stadium on August 27, 2022 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images)
CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA - AUGUST 27: Drake Maye #10 of the North Carolina Tar Heels takes the field for his first series as the team's starting quarterback against the Florida A&M Rattlers during the first half of their game at Kenan Memorial Stadium on August 27, 2022 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images) /
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Spring football is over. Now it’s time to look towards the 2023 football season. How does the UNC football program stack up against the rest of the country?

The UNC football program wrapped up its spring season a few weeks ago while some other programs played their spring seasons throughout the month of April. Now that the spring football season is officially wrapped up, everyone is looking to the 2023 season and ready to countdown to kick off on August 26th.

Many news outlets have released their pre-season top-25 rankings with the spring season officially completed and the UNC football program finds itself among those rankings:

Across seven different media outlets, the Tar Heels are ranked as high as 16th (by USA Today), and as low as 22nd (The Athletic and Sporting News). These rankings seem appropriate based on the 2022 season and how Carolina stumbled to the finish line losing their last four games.

While rankings do not indicate how the season will go or what to expect, they do build expectations around the program and the fanbase. UNC football fans are begging Mack Brown to get the program back to the top 10 and be competitive in the college football landscape.

In year two under Brown, the Tar Heels jumped into the top 5 of the AP Poll before losing at Florida State. Granted, that was during COVID when half the country had yet to start playing games or had a small sample size.

After making an Orange Bowl appearance in his second season and returning pre-season Heisman Trophy candidate Sam Howell, Brown took the UNC football program into the 2021 season pre-season ranked as high as no. 10 in the country. Unfortunately, that led to a disappointing 6-7 season.

Now in a similar situation just two years later, how will the Tar Heels respond to the expectations of the media and the fanbase? The depth chart isn’t finalized yet and a lot can happen during fall camp. So it’s a little too early to discuss, but the UNC football program has given fans no reason to buy into the off-season hype to this point in the Mack Brown 2.0 era with the product on the field.

The Tar Heels will kick off the 2023 season in Charlotte on September 2nd vs South Carolina. Time and Network are still TBA.

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