Bowl options abound for Heels, rest of ACC

North Carolina has a shot at Orange Bowl, but must claim ACC title to earn a trip to Miami

CHAPEL HILL -- North Carolina will be focused on staying in the hunt for the ACC championship game when it kicks off at Maryland today. The formula is now simple: win its final three games.

In the meantime, several bowl directors will be watching to see if they can stay in the hunt to snag the No. 17 Tar Heels (7-2, 3-2 ACC), who have won five of their past six games.

"North Carolina's going to be looked at favorably by everybody," said Steve Hogan, executive director of the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando. "The fan base is strong, they've done very well this year, and there's a real excitement around that program."

Indeed, if North Carolina keeps winning, it will almost certainly be gone by the time the Champs officials get to pick. Miami's win over Virginia Tech on Thursday night gave the Tar Heels a clear path to the league title game in Tampa, Fla., on Dec. 6. The winner there automatically advances to the BCS Orange Bowl.

Atlanta's Chick-fil-A Bowl and Jacksonville's Gator Bowl get the next picks, followed by the Champs Sports Bowl.

In all, the ACC is contractually tied to nine bowl games; eight teams have already qualified to play in the postseason. But with so much parity and the weekly power shifts in the league, the championship game lineup may not be solidified for another two weeks.

The bowls don't have to choose teams exactly by their order of league finish. Instead, they only have to take a team that is within one win of the conference record of the best remaining team.

So even if the Tar Heels don't end up in the league title game, they could still be invited to the Chick-fil-A Bowl ahead of the championship game runner-up, or a team with one more conference victory. UNC last played in the Atlanta game in 2001.

"Certainly, Carolina is in our mix,'' said Chick-fil-A Bowl president Gary Stokan. "We're in a pretty good situation, because looking down the standings, all of the teams we could get are very good."

Barring a major meltdown on the field, it's hard to imagine UNC -- the league team ranked highest in national polls -- dropping too far down the bowl list.

The Orange Bowl is now in play. The Chick-fil-A is interested. And the Gator Bowl's representatives also sound intrigued; after all, the two are familiar with each other, since UNC played in the Jacksonville game in 1996 and '97.

Besides knowing that UNC fans will fill the seats, "there are a lot of intangibles that make it interesting this year -- Butch [Davis, a former Miami coach] possibly coming back to Florida to play, the fact that they're having a really good season for the first time in a long time," Gator Bowl president Rick Catlett said.

"... Also, you'd like to catch teams on their way up, rather than on their way down."

UNC fits that criteria, having clinched bowl eligibility on Oct. 25 with a 45-24 victory over Boston College -- and now having the chance to win the Coastal Division. The Tar Heels haven't played in the postseason since 2004, when they earned a trip to the then-named Continental Tire Bowl in Charlotte. Now it's just a matter of when and where.

And whether they'll get to play in the ACC title game along the way.

"Of course we're happy about being bowl eligible,'' cornerback Kendric Burney said after they reached six wins this year. "But we're not concentrating on that; we want more."