NC State, North Carolina matchup is primed to add to rivalry’s many memorable moments
Whether you think T.A. was in or a bunch of players throwing punches was just “their team celebrating and our team celebrating,” there’s almost always more than enough drama for partisans and neutrals alike when North Carolina and N.C. State play, even in years when there’s nothing on the line other than bragging rights.
Which is, let’s face it, most of them.
This is that rare end-of-season meeting Friday where there is something on the line, and because Wake Forest and Boston College don’t play until Saturday, N.C. State can keep its Atlantic Division hopes alive for at least another 18 hours with a win while North Carolina can dash them entirely.
That additional fuel for the fire certainly increases the chances that a rivalry that has generated more than its fair share of memorable plays could produce another.
Neither team was playing for anything other than pride in 2004, when T.A. McLendon was ruled short of the goal line amid a bevy of humanity, nor in 2012 when Gio Bernard ran down the N.C. State sideline and into history, with UNC ineligible for the postseason.
The last time the stakes were this high, Russell Wilson kept N.C. State’s division hopes alive with his 2-yard Hail Mary at Kenan Stadium. A week later, the Wolfpack got Torrey Smithed at Maryland and that was that.
That kind of thing tends to happen when interest in this game doesn’t extend that far beyond the state’s borders. A game with significant ACC implications could also make what has so often been a crucible of bad feelings downright combustible.
The kind of melee that Larry Fedora tried to pretend away in 2018 — seven players were suspended for “celebrating” — in what was more or less his last act as North Carolina coach has not been an uncommon occurrence. One of the most famous brawls occurred in Mack Brown’s very first win against N.C. State, back in 1993, starting on the sideline during the game and ending with two assistant coaches rolling around on the ground after it.
Not that this is any endorsement of fighting — in football or hockey — but merely a measure of the inherent dislike that tends to bubble over in all kinds of places, like N.C. State’s hype video last year that posed the question “What’s a ram to a wolf? Prey.” North Carolina’s players took umbrage on and off the field in a 48-21 win in the first meeting with both teams ranked in the top 25 since 1993.
“We don’t really care about them,” UNC quarterback Sam Howell said. “That’s more for them, to give them some false confidence before the game. .. .We know what a ram is to a wolf. I think we saw that out there today. It could’ve been a lot worse than it was.”
Howell’s latter words gave the lie to his opening sentence, and his coach would certainly agree. Brown has won seven straight over the Wolfpack at UNC, with a two-decade gap (and a loss while at Texas) between. Before Brown’s return, N.C. State had won four of five. The first of those wins, Dave Doeren’s first against UNC, provoked his hand-in-the-dirt, “blue-collar school” manifesto at Kenan Stadium that now hangs on the wall in the Murphy Center.
The part of that broadside that’s less remembered by history was the (possibly apocryphal) bit about being accosted at the dry cleaner by a fancy-belted, collar-popped UNC fan. It played to his larger point: As far as he is concerned, this is class warfare.
North Carolina got its payback for that 35-7 loss a year later at Carter-Finley, the Coastal Division title already clinched. It was 35-7 at the end of the first quarter.
So here we are, six years later, with N.C. State potentially playing for a division title of its own. And here we are, a year after it looked like North Carolina had all the momentum, with the Wolfpack newly ascendant.
This game always means something. This one really does.
This story was originally published November 26, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
