Saturday may be NC State’s best — or last — chance to slow North Carolina’s momentum
Mack Brown walked back in the door last fall and picked up where he left off against N.C. State, his sixth straight win over the Wolfpack at North Carolina, spread over a mere three decades.
The stakes haven’t been this high since he left, and as high as they may be for the Tar Heels — trying to get back on track and live up to the hype after losing at Florida State — they’re even higher for the Wolfpack on Saturday.
With North Carolina cleaning up on the recruiting trail, with the Tar Heels headed in a completely different direction than they were two years ago, it feels like the gap between the two programs is widening.
Saturday may be N.C. State’s best chance to slow North Carolina’s momentum.
It may be N.C. State’s last chance to slow UNC’s momentum.
At least for a while.
Having both teams ranked for the first time since 1993 certainly injects some quality into this rivalry, but it has never been short of drama or twists of fate. If one team has the edge, even when that edge appears unassailble, it’s not usually for long. Brown exited in 1997 with complete dominance, but Chuck Amato and Tom O’Brien both had their moments with the upper hand. John Bunting and Butch Davis and Larry Fedora had theirs.
Dave Doeren planted his flag, figuratively speaking, after the 2014 win in Kenan Stadium with his “hand in the dirt” manifesto that ended up on a plaque in the Murphy Center. The Tar Heels had an answer of their own in 2015, and it was a long, long way down to his next trip back, two years later, when he may have saved his job with another win over North Carolina.
At the same time, Fedora’s inattention to in-state recruiting let Doeren and the Wolfpack make inroads, and the 2018 home loss to N.C. State may have been North Carolina’s lowest point in the rivalry in a generation, an overtime loss at the end of a 2-9 season marred by a fight after the final whistle that the about-to-be-fired Fedora preposterously claimed didn’t happen.
These things go back and forth. Always.
Enter Mack (again), and everything changed, against N.C. State and everyone else.
Even with N.C. State in the top 25, there’s no question the basic foundations of football in the state have shifted since Brown came back and immediately put North Carolina back on solid footing. Whatever gains the Wolfpack made during the Tar Heels’ slow decline under Fedora were wiped out, and then some.
So this is not merely a chance to knock the Tar Heels down a peg. It is not merely a battle for Triangle supremacy in a year when Duke is way out of the running, even if N.C. State will be without injured quarterback Devin Leary. There are implications surrounding this game that go far beyond this week or this season.
The Wolfpack is off to a good start so far, the inexplicable loss at Virginia Tech notwithstanding, and this has the potential to be a bounceback season for N.C. State, but that’s not enough. North Carolina has all of the momentum right now, not just on the field but on the recruiting trail as well.
There’s a palpable sense that this program, always a sleeping giant, never a giant, has perhaps finally been awakened. If N.C. State is going to keep pace, it has to find a way to slow North Carolina down.
At the rate the Tar Heels are gathering speed, this may be the Wolfpack’s best chance to do that. It may be the Wolfpack’s last chance for a while.
This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
