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Every offseason, we run historical ranking series focusing on North Carolina basketball and football.
The purpose each spring isn’t to make declarative statements, but to have fun offering a subjective look at the best teams and players ever at Carolina. This effort is to generate discourse, debate, and take UNC fans down memory lane.
This season, we are doing something a little different, combining football and basketball, as we offer our take on the Top 40 UNC football and basketball players of all time. The CRITERIA are quite simple: The process includes playing careers with the Tar Heels and professionally, other relevant impacts they’ve had on their sports, coaching, and championships. We also gave a lean toward all UNC accomplishments.
So, this isn’t a UNC-only list, a pro-only list, or a straight up purely best ever list. Some Tar Heels on this list didn’t have great pro careers but were so good and historic at UNC, they simply had to make the cut. Some on this list weren’t stars at UNC, but had outstanding and/or highly distinguished pro careers, that it warranted their place among these 40 athletes.
We hope you enjoy the list and feel free to disagree, as we know many will.
We continue our countdown with:
No. 33: Don McCauley (1968-70)
McCauley was a two-time ACC Player of the Year and was named the ACC’s Male Athlete of the Year for the 1970-71 school year. He was a consensus All-America in 1970.
That season, he set an NCAA record with 1,720 yards rushing, breaking O.J. Simpson’s single-season mark set a few years earlier. That number remains the third highest single-season total in ACC history, and it came in an 11-game season.
It was an important accomplishment for several reasons, including that it helped nudge Carolina football back onto the national radar for the first time since the Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice era, some 20 years earlier.
In his UNC career, McCauley accumulated 5,014 all-purpose yards, 3,172 rushing yards, 786 yards receiving, and 1,056 yards on kick returns. He also led the team in punting with 48 punts for 1,845 yards—a 38.4-yard average. Scored 37 touchdowns as a Tar Heel. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2001. His number 23 is honored by UNC.
McCauley was a first-round selection in the 1971 NFL draft and spent 11 seasons in the league, all with the Baltimore Colts. He played in 156 games, combining for 5,653 yards, which included an amazing 333 receptions as a running back. Twice he caught 50 or more passes and in seven different seasons he caught 30 or more. McCauley scored 58 touchdowns in his NFL career.
He returned 43 kickoffs in the NFL for 967 yards (22.5 average) and a touchdown. McCauley also threw a touchdown pass in 1974.
