College Football Hall of Famer Dick Sheridan returns to NC State

In 1988, Vince Dooley had stepped down after winning 201 games and owning a .715 winning percentage over 25 seasons on the sideline with the Bulldogs. Georgia turned to Sheridan, who was completing his third season in Raleigh after eight successful years at Furman.

“I told my coaching staff and players, ‘Y’all be the first to know about what’s going on.’ I thought it was just an interview, and it was,” Sheridan noted. "But they asked me to step out of the room, and when they went back in, they said, ‘We want to offer you the job.’ I wasn’t expecting that.

“I said, ‘I can’t accept it right now. I told my coaches and my players they’ll be the first to know.’ Somebody on the committee leaked that to the press and put me in a terrible position … where if I accepted the job I was lying to them. So, I told them no.”

It’s a story emblematic of how Sheridan approached his job as a head coach.

He spent four more years with NC State and finished with a 52-29-3 overall record over seven seasons, including 31-18-1 in the ACC. In each of his last two years, the Pack won nine games in the regular season and finished ranked in both of the top 25 polls.

Sheridan stepped down before the 1993 season. He has been back to Raleigh numerous times since, including recently to see one of his former assistants Bobby Purcell inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

His granddaughter dreamed of attending NC State, and the two toured the campus together before she ultimately accepted a full academic scholarship to Virginia instead.

Sheridan is back in Raleigh this weekend. He will be honored during Saturday’s game against Louisville to celebrate his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.

His first thought about the honor was true to Sheridan’s unselfish way of thinking.

“I’m so proud of the guys that were a part of that,” Sheridan said. “We did it together. It was not just me.”

Sheridan remains fondly remembered around Raleigh. For one, he quickly turned the tide against UNC in a rivalry that the Heels had dominated before he arrived. In Sheridan’s seven years, he beat UNC six times, including five in a row when Mack Brown was hired in his first go-round with the Heels.

That initial season, when Sheridan’s Wolfpack surprised a lot of observers by going 8-3-1 after three straight years when the Pack went 3-8 each time, remains the highlight on the field for Sheridan.

He can still remember the reaction when NC State knocked off No. 18 North Carolina, 35-34.

“The way the fans reacted, the players, because we weren’t favored, of course,” Sheridan recalled. “North Carolina always out-recruited us. They always out-recruited everybody. They were always ranked first in the ACC. We were down in the bottom.”

Yet Sheridan had considerably more success than UNC during his seven seasons in Raleigh because he applied lessons he learned from his eight years at Furman, during which he went 69-23-2 and in his final season made it to the Division I-AA Championship game.

The first lesson Sheridan picked up was that character mattered.

“I got used to we had the highest academic standard in the conference,” Sheridan said. “Character and academics, the academic goals, I got used to that.

“And another thing I got used to was height was not that important. We won with a lot of players who were one or two inches shorter than the big boys and other people wanted, but they were good players.”

Another aspect of Furman that Sheridan brought with him to NC State was the famous diamond logo, which Sheridan wore on his jacket Friday during a luncheon with former players and others around NC State athletics.

Part of it was strategic, a way to separate NC State from other teams like Syracuse and Stanford that had a block S.

But there was a symbolic aspect to it.

Sheridan wanted an athletic, tough-minded and committed football team, and he noted that the diamond was a tough and shiny-looking object that was a universal sign of commitment.

There was a lot in NC State that Sheridan saw he could apply from his coaching at Furman. There was also the chance to get the Wolfpack program that was on its third coach in seven years back on a proper footing.

“It’s always fun to build something and make it right,” Sheridan noted.

That’s what he did at NC State, and why he is sure to receive a warm welcome Saturday when he returns to Carter-Finley Stadium.