Over the past couple months, there’s been plenty of content around sports media about the “best (X)” of the last 25 years. The year 2025 marks a tentpole year in this century, as we’re a quarter of the way through it. Therefore, it makes a bit of sense to take some time to look at what’s happened in this century so far.
The folks over at The Athletic have done a fair bit of that recently, and that continued on Wednesday, with their article ranking the top 25 college basketball teams of the 2000s so far. As you might expect considering UNC’s success in that timeframe, the North Carolina Tar Heels feature on the list in a couple different places.
Two Carolina teams made the top 25, while another two featured in the list’s honorable mentions. The 2008-09 national championship Tar Heels’ team was the highest UNC representative, coming in at #5. Meanwhile, the title-winning 2004-05 team were #15. The third in the trio of Roy Williams’ championships in 2016-17 made the honorable mentions, as did 2007-08, which only made the Final Four, but does have one of the best overall winning percentages in program history.The 2008-09 team went 33-4 on the road to the national title that season, and memorably beat everyone by double digits in their six-game run through the NCAA Tournament. The 2004-05 team went 33-4, featuring four lottery picks in that year’s NBA Draft, and also beat an Illinois team — that also appears on this list — in the championship game.
The four teams that ended up ahead of the Tyler Hansbrough and Ty Lawson-led ‘08-09 team were #4 2014-15 Kentucky, #3 2023-24 UConn, #2 2011-12 Kentucky, and the winners, #1 2000-01 Duke. You can, and I probably would, quibble with the choices, but it’s all understandable how those four ended up in discussion and ahead of UNC.
In total, there were 10 ACC teams — including then ACC 2001-02 Maryland — among the top 25 and seven honorable mentions. Annoyingly, Duke also got four teams into that group, but all of theirs ended up in the top 25.
At the end of the day, none of these rankings truly matter for anything but arguing about with fellow fans, but they do always end up interesting me. Of course from a Carolina blue-tinted glasses perspective, I would probably have some differences, but it’s absolutely inarguable that UNC have produced some of the best teams from this century so far.
