The state of North Carolina has produced hundreds of exceptional athletes, but who ranks at the very top of the list?

We’re asking you to make that difficult decision.

Beginning Sunday, we’re going to start a 64-player tournament on newsobserver.com. It’ll operate along the lines of the NCAA basketball tournament.

After an agonizing, entirely subjective process, we’ve seeded the field – four regions with 16 athletes in each.

The four No. 1 regional seeds are (alphabetically) – Charlie Justice (football), Julius Peppers (football and basketball), Richard Petty (auto racing) and David Thompson (basketball).

For the sake of simplicity, we limited the 64 contenders to males born in the state.

That decision means there will be a lot of familiar names omitted – Tim Duncan (born in the U.S. Virgin Isles), Ron Francis (born in Canada), Grant Hill (Texas), Christian Laettner (New York), Michael Jordan (New York), Pete Maravich (Pennsylvania), Arnold Palmer (Pennsylvania), Philip Rivers (Alabama), Lennie Rosenbluth (New York), Russell Wilson (Virginia) and countless others.

Each week through July 22, voters will reduce the field by one half and results will be updated weekly.

Have some fun and help us decide. Vote here now.