When .500 feels fantastic: N.C. State revels in 35-30 rivalry win over North Carolina
The playoff committee wasn’t locked into this one. The prize on offer was whatever bowl berth the ACC will have left lying around Sunday afternoon. Maybe somewhere like Birmingham, with the actual bonus another 10 practices with a bunch of players who — in college football in 2024 — probably won’t be around next season anyway.
So why was N.C. State’s D.K. Kaufman so desperate to plant a Wolfpack flag in the middle of Kenan Stadium’s fake turf that it provoked a surge of returning North Carolina players who had been on their way off the field? And why was J.J. Jones moved to tear the flag away from him and ignite a brawl of sparring players pushing and shoving and grabbing at each other’s helmets?
Because it’s N.C. State and North Carolina, North Carolina and N.C. State. And even when the net result of the Wolfpack’s 35-30 win Saturday is the enforced mediocrity of .500 football for both 6-6 teams, this one win (or loss) matters more than the other five wins (or losses).
It always has. It always will.
The Wolfpack had done the planting-the-flag thing after winning here in 2022, and if Jones was utterly determined to stop N.C. State from doing it again, the time to act had passed in the final minute when the Tar Heels couldn’t hold a one-point lead.
So another UNC coach departs with a home-field loss to UNC’s most hated football rival, and with a melee after the final whistle as well. In Larry Fedora’s last game, it was in the end zone, what he declared was “two teams celebrating.” In Mack Brown’s final home game, it was directly on top of the interlocking N and C at the 50-yard line, territory the Wolfpack previously tried to claim as its own two years earlier.
“Beating Carolina matters more than winning a game to get bowl-eligible to me,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said. “That may sound weird, but when I got hired, they didn’t say, ‘Win six and get to a bowl.’ They said, ‘Whatever you do, beat Carolina.’ And we did that. Four years in a row. That means a lot to me. That’s the reason I haven’t been able to wear blue for 12 years. For real.
“So this game is deep. I said it’s the biggest game of the year and it is the biggest game of the year. Our players know that. Our fans know that. Our administration knows that. It’s meaningful. I don’t say that to brag. I’m just saying that because it’s a rivalry.”
It’s becoming a theme. That’s the Wolfpack’s fourth straight win over the Tar Heels, the second straight in Chapel Hill. N.C. State receiver Noah Rogers, who made the game’s biggest catch on the Wolfpack’s final drive, is 1-0 in the rivalry. His older brother Cyrus went through UNC’s senior night having fallen to 0-4.
“Knowing he’s beaten me in a lot of things,” Noah Rogers said, “it’s great.”
As is so often the case, what the game lacked in quality or national significance it more than compensated in drama. Omarion Hampton’s go-ahead touchdown in the final minute, sprinting 47 yards to put the Tar Heels ahead, gave UNC a one-point lead but left 111 seconds on the clock.
Freshman quarterback C.J. Bailey led the Wolfpack down the field, throwing a jump ball deep for Rogers down the right side on 1st-and-20 from his own 39. Rogers was in one-on-one coverage, but the ball hung up long enough for the safety to sprint over. Three players went up. The only N.C. State player came down with the ball.
Rogers, earlier, had two would-be completions bounce off his hands. Under much more difficult circumstances, he carved out his own little place in the rivalry, the kind of thing that will get referenced with the next big catch, the next game-winning drive, the next game-changing play.
And N.C. State, whose season had to that point been defined by the failure to find a way to win close games against Wake Forest and Syracuse and Georgia Tech, finally figured it out, at the very last possible moment — at what any Wolfpacker would say is the best possible moment, when this was all that was left to accomplish in a season gone sideways.
Hollywood Smothers punched it in three plays later, North Carolina’s final drive fizzled and the postgame handshakes inevitably degenerated into the kind of scenes everyone pretends to condemn but only serve to underline how much this matters, even when it doesn’t really matter that much to anyone else, anywhere else.
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This story was originally published November 30, 2024 at 8:50 PM.
