  We show how to match quark models to the 1/Nc expansion of QCD. As an example
we discuss in detail the mass operator of orbitally excited baryons and match
it to the one-gluon exchange and the one-boson exchange variants of the quark
model. The matching procedure is very general and makes use of the
transformation properties of states and operators under S_N^{orb} \times
S_N^{sp-fl}, the permutation group acting on the orbital and spin-flavor
degrees of freedom of N quarks.
