Philip Rivers is an exception to the rule that any athlete's standing has to be measured first at the win window.

Ninety percent of the time, greatness has to be associated with great wins. That's why, in ACC basketball, we always go back to David Thompson and Christian Laettner to begin the pecking order.

At N.C. State, Thompson won a national championship in 1974 and carried his team to an undefeated season the previous season. Laettner left Duke with two NCAA title rings.

They won, they led, they starred, they stayed. That set them apart from James Worthy, Michael Jordan, Jason Williams and the other ACC greats.

Rivers' regular-season football career will end today when he leads N.C. State against Maryland. He'll leave without a national title. He'll leave without even an ACC title. He never has even been voted first-team All-ACC.

Rivers, in short, has won, but he hasn't won big.

I don't care. He's still the best football player in ACC history.

I say that with all due respect to Chris Weinke, Charlie Ward, Randy White, Peter Warrick, William Perry, Shawn Jones, Lawrence Taylor and all of the other serious contenders for the same distinction.

Rivers will not win the Heisman Trophy, and if he bombs today against the Terrapins, I guess there could be doubts that he'll be named ACC player of the year.

In their careers as Florida State quarterbacks, Weinke and Ward not only won the Heisman but also left with national championship rings. Like Rivers, the two were first-class people on and off the field.

White, at Maryland in the 1970s, was the most dominant college lineman of his era. He was the first down lineman to combine exceptional size and quickness. He revolutionized defensive concepts first at the college level and then in the NFL.

Until White came along, no one cared a flip about a lineman's 40-yard sprint time or vertical jumping ability. Now, both are standard measurements. He played on Maryland teams that lost three league games in three years.

For a league often viewed as a football middleweight, the ACC has turned out its share of exceptional college and pro players. The list of quarterbacks alone is impressive -- Sonny Jurgensen, Norm Snead, Roman Gabriel, Boomer Esiason, Neil O'Donnell, Erik Kramer, Aaron Brooks, Leo Hart, Dave Brown and Danny Kanell, to mention a few.

But at the college level, not one of those players could stack up evenly against Rivers. He'll exit at No. 2 all-time in NCAA Division I-A passing and total offensive yardage. He has 90 career touchdown passes. To put that in perspective, take into account that Esiason (1981-83) and O'Donnell (1987-89) combined for 68 TD passes at Maryland. So far this season, Rivers has thrown 408 passes. Six have been intercepted.

Statistics reveal only a part of Rivers' scope, however. He's done all of this at N.C. State, not at Florida State or Florida or Oklahoma. The talent around Rivers has been good, not great, throughout his career. He often has gone into games without a healthy tailback to help deflect the defensive attention on him. That probably will be the case again today.

A line you heard a lot from Florida State fans last week was, "If we had signed Rivers, we wouldn't have lost a game in two years." I'll buy that.

The Seminoles probably could have signed Rivers, too. They scouted him but already had a commitment from Chris Rix, one of the nation's top-ranked prep players in the fall of 1999.

But Rivers is the first to say it all worked out for the best. He won't get a championship or the Heisman, but he has been the central player in the revitalization of an entire program. If the Pack can continue to improve in the years ahead, Rivers one day will be remembered as the foundation upon which it was all built.

He has done it all with incredible stamina, grace and class.

He's been the best.

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