North Carolina Guide Greatest Coaches

These have been my favorites. I am not smart enough to know how good they were at coaching but they won and sometimes they won games they had no business winning. As for the guys like Frank McGuire who were before my time I don't know anything about them so they don't make the list even if they were as great as the old-timers say.  So my top 5 NC ACC coaches are:

1)Dean Smith: Yes he is like a God in North Carolina, though some of his moves annoyed me. But I could say the same thing about God.

2) Mike Krys%$#@$%: His players love him. His fans love him. Other teams fans hate him. So he must be doing something right. But does he need to do those commercials?

3) Jim Valvano: Valvano was my favorite ACC coach ever. He got a lot out of his players and he was the kind of guy you wished you could hang out with at his back yard barbecue. Even as a Carolina fan, when NC State beat Houston in 1983 to win the National Championship, I was never happier, at least after a basketball game. They ran him out of town and it seems like NC State has been cursed ever since.

4) Roy Williams: He was great before he came back to UNC but winning the national Championship in 2005 and finishing 2nd in the ACC with a team that had been decimated by the NBA makes me think that the best is yet to come so I may as well put him on the list now.

5) Herb Sendek: Way to go Raleigh. You managed to run two of my top 5 coaches out of town. It was tough to choose between Herb and Dave Odem of Wake Forest but when you think about that Justin Gainy team that won the 1997 play-in game and kept winning until they ran out of steam in the ACC championship game you have to give the players and their coach a lot of credit. Then in 2005 they knocked off UCONN in the NCAAs. Something tells me they are gonna miss ole Herb.

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