In his eighth season as NC State’s head football coach, Beattie “Big Chief” Feathers took his veteran squad to Louisville to face a young Cardinal quarterback named Johnny Unitas on a snow-dusted field.
Feathers had his own future NFL superstar in junior halfback Alex “Big Red” Webster and was favored to beat the Cardinals with freshman Unitas making just the second start of his college career.
With the Cards leading 6-2 early in the second half, Webster caught a handful of lime — the chalk-like powder used to mark yard lines and hash marks – to his eyes and missed most of the rest of the game, and Louisville blindsided the Wolfpack 26-2.
It was the final season at NC State for Feathers, the first true superstar coach ever hired to lead the Wolfpack.
A former All-American tailback at Tennessee in General Robert Neyland’s single-wing offense, the Bristol, Virginia, native became an early star in the National Football League.
As a Chicago Bears rookie in 1934, Feathers became the first running back in NFL history to rush for more than 1,000 yards in a single season, though he was never paid more than $200 per game that season. He was a consensus first-team All-Pro selection after leading the league with 1,004 yards on 119 carries, eight rushing touchdowns and 91.3 rushing yards per game.
“Beattie Feathers was not only a great player, but his habits were absolutely perfect,” Bears owner George Halas once said of this star tailback.
Injuries, however, doomed his career, and he never gained more than 350 yards in a season over his seven-year career that ended just before the start of World War II. He was second-team All-Pro in 1936, when he earned $3,500 a year to play for the Bears.
In 1941, he joined Appalachian State’s football program as an assistant coach, while he enrolled in school to complete his teaching degree. The next year, he was named head coach, leading the Mountaineers to a 5-2-1 record. It was his only season in Boone, with Appalachian cancelling football in 1943 and ’44 because of the war.
Feathers spent one season as the backfield coach at State under head coach Williams “Doc” Newton, who left following the 1943 season to become the head coach at South Carolina, in part because of the difficulty of recruiting to State, which was a U.S. Army training center during the war.
Unlike students at Navy training centers at other Triangle schools, Army trainees were not allowed to participate in collegiate athletics.
Newton stayed with the Gamecocks for only one season and finished his coaching career with four seasons at Guilford.
Feathers was elevated to head coach with Newton’s departure, and was also named the head coach for baseball. He coached the diamond squad for just the 1945 season before giving way to the next superstar coach hired at State, Wake Forest native and former Detroit Tigers star pitcher Vic Sorrell.
Feathers, while largely uncelebrated for his sub-.500 football coaching career, did accomplish a number of firsts in his eight years as head coach of the Wolfpack.
In 1946, following an 8-3 regular season in which the Wolfpack were ranked nationally for the first time, he took the team to the second-annual Gator Bowl on New Year’s Day in Jacksonville, Florida. NC State lost to Oklahoma in the school’s first postseason bowl game.
In 1950, the Wolfpack won its first game over a defending national champion when it beat Maryland 16-12 in the first televised game in program history.
Feathers also found success in bringing important recruits to NC State, including All-American lineman Elmer Costa, rugged blocking back Bob Bowlby and star halfback Webster. All were from New Jersey.
After the 1951 season, however, Feathers owned just a 37-38 record with the Wolfpack, with four winning seasons in eight years. He had the longest tenure of State’s first 21 head coaches. His single-wing offense was considered outdated and was largely unpopular with Wolfpack fans, and he likely would have been relieved even if the team had finished better than its 3-7 record.
“In my opinion the record didn’t enter into the decision,” said H.A. Fisher, the chairman of the athletics committee that voted 12-1 to replace Feathers.
Shortly after the end of the regular season, Feathers and his three assistants were relieved of their jobs, after the first year of a three-year contract that paid Feathers $8,000 a year. He was replaced by one of his own assistants, Duke graduate Horace Hendrickson, who coached the Wolfpack for two seasons during an era when the program was deeply in debt and on the verge of being eliminated as a varsity sport.
“The council believed a change was for the best interests of the college and perhaps would have taken the same action had the past season been a winning one,” reported the Raleigh News & Observer.
Feathers was never a head football coach again, but did spend seven years as an assistant coach at Texas Tech and became the head baseball coach there in 1954, restarting a program that had been dormant since 1930.
He returned to North Carolina in 1961 to become an assistant football coach at Wake Forest, a position he held for 17 years. From 1972-75, Feathers was the Demon Deacons’ head baseball coach. He stayed in Winston-Salem following retirement, where he died at the age of 69 on March 11, 1979.
Feathers was elected to the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame in 1955. Two years ago, when the Chicago Bears celebrated the 100th anniversary of the NFL, Feathers was ranked No. 90 on the list of Top 100 Bears of all time.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
• Talk about it inside The Wolves' Den
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, The Wolfpacker
• Follow us on Twitter: @TheWolfpacker
• Like us on Facebook
