Tobacco Road

As the 2005 NCAA basketball season entered conference tournament play, three of the nation's top five rated teams were from the famed basketball hotbed in North Carolina known as "Tobacco Road." Between 1981 and 2005, teams from the four basketball powerhouses - Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Wake Forest - reached the Final Four nineteen times and won seven national championships. Not since the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants all played in New York City have rivalries so passionate been contained within such a small geographical region. These four college programs grew up within just thirty-four miles of each other (though Wake eventually moved across the state to Winston-Salem) and have staged classic battles throughout the decades, featuring stars like David Thompson, Michael Jordan, Johnny Dawkins, and Tim Duncan, and legendary coaches such as Dean Smith, Jim Valvano, Mike Kryzewski, and Roy Williams, Tobacco Road covers the rich traditions of Tobacco Road basketball - and the backyard rivalries that become more and more intense with every year.