9/16/2021 football Edit

Earle Edwards, the engineer of Wolfpack football, retired 50 years ago

Tim Peeler

The Wolfpacker contributor

Suddenly and permanently, Earle Edwards was gone.

Fifty years ago, the most successful coach in NC State football history abruptly resigned in late June, leaving the program he — quite literally — engineered from its foundation to his long-time lieutenant Al Michaels as a one-year interim.

The announcement was surprising, even to his players and members of his staff, the same kind of abrupt change in leadership that happened some two decades later when highly successful Dick Sheridan announced his resignation due to health issues just weeks before the start of fall camp in 1993.

Edwards’ decision was not based on health: he simply decided that his time in the captain’s chair for Wolfpack football was over.

“My reason for resigning is a simple one,” Edwards said in announcing his retirement after 17 years as head coach. “I have been at it for a long time. This move is a good one for everybody connected with our football program. It is something I want to do. I have given careful thought to the matter in recent months. I hope it will be helpful to all of us.

“There is no bad health, and that was not a basic reason. All things must end for all of us, and I feel this is the time for me to get out of coaching. Our squad will be in good hands with Coach Michaels. The caliber of football instruction for our squad compares favorably with any I know of.”

NC State Wolfpack football Earle Edwards — Edwards' 77 wins at NC State remains the most in school history. (NC State)

It wasn’t surprising that Edwards wanted someone from his staff to succeed him. Three of the four assistants he brought with him to NC State (Michaels, Bill Smaltz and Carey Brewbaker) in 1954 were still on his staff and every other staff position was filled by one of Edwards’ former players.

That’s how Edwards found success — through loyalty, stability and quiet competence.

The native of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, was a scrawny football player who earned an industrial engineering degree at Penn State just prior to World War II. He put that to use as a professional engineer for two years, but yearned to get into coaching.

He stayed at his alma mater until it became clear that he would not succeed Rip Engle in the head coaching seat. He went to Michigan State, where he helped the Spartans win a national championship in 1952.

When Duffy Daugherty was elevated to head coach to replace Biggie Munn after the 1953 season, Edwards resigned to consider three possible jobs: an administrator for the newly organized Canadian Football League or the head coach at either Marquette in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or NC State in Raleigh.

He chose to come South where his mannerly demeanor was immediately appreciated.

Edwards was in no way flashy and always religiously non-vulgar. The worst thing he ever said on the field, in his office or at his home was “Holy Balls!” And no member of his staff or his team could utter anything worse.

He willingly sacrificed his own success — much in the same way Les Robinson did with men’s basketball — to improve his team, mainly by scheduling as many games away from Riddick Stadium as possible, because its 14,000 permanent seats were just too few to draw a revenue-producing crowd. He even allowed NC State’s home games with North Carolina to be moved to Chapel Hill.

Edwards and his team played so many of its games away from home that he felt it necessary to bring in an etiquette expert before the start of every season to teach his players — many from rural North Carolina and non-urban parts of Pennsylvania — proper table manners for their formal meals on the road.

During one stretch in 1960 and ’61, the Wolfpack played 10 consecutive games away from home. That’s back when Edwards regularly scheduled two-thirds of his games away from Riddick Stadium to help raise funds for a new place to play.

Wolfpack fans, however, didn’t really mind. They fell in love with Edwards early on, back when they were so used to losing in football and winning in men’s basketball that any gridiron success was unexpectedly sublime.

When his team beat North Carolina in the 1956 season-opener to hand prodigal coach Jim Tatum a loss in his first game back at his alma mater, it was the perfect way to begin the relationship. It only strengthened when the Wolfpack opened the next two seasons with wins over Tatum’s Tar Heels.

In 1957, with the remarkable backfield of Dick Hunter and Dick Christy, the Wolfpack won the school’s first conference title since 1927, though they weren’t allowed to accept a bid to the Orange Bowl because of department-wide NCAA sanctions leveled on Everett Case’s basketball program.

Still, he took his team on the road, from Los Angeles to Laramie, Wyoming, to Mobile, Alabama, chasing guaranteed money to keep the athletics department afloat and put away a little extra for a new home.

Edwards’ dream of a better facility finally became a reality in 1966, when gleaming Carter Stadium opened adjacent to the North Carolina State Fairgrounds.

The next season, the Wolfpack had its greatest success, beating No. 2 Houston on the road, rising as high as No. 3 in the national polls and ultimately winning the first postseason bowl game in school history with a victory over Georgia in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tennessee.

Quietly, the Wolfpack won its fifth outright ACC title under Edwards in 1968. He replaced 17 of 22 starters from the year before and still managed to win the ACC championship with a 6-1 league mark.

Edwards’ five ACC championships are tied for fifth in league history for the most by a head coach.

After only two more seasons, in which the Wolfpack won only six of 21 games, Edwards made his decision to retire and concentrate on newly created duties with NC State’s Foundations and Development Office and to serve his one-year term as president of the American Football Coaches Association, the only NC State coach to ever hold that title.

He finished his career with more wins than any coach in Wolfpack history, though he also had more losses and ties (77-88-8).

He produced excellent players, including All-Americans Christy, Roman Gabriel and Dennis Byrd, and NFL players Darrell Dess, “Hoot” Gibson, Joe Scarpati, Bert Wilder, Tom Dellinger, Ron Carpenter, Dan Medlin and many others.

He was inducted into the 1974 class of both the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. In 1991, he was presented with the Watauga Medal, honoring those who have made significant contributions to the advancement of NC State University.

Edwards remained in Raleigh throughout his 26 years of retirement. He reconnected with the football team when Sheridan was hired in 1986. When the new coach did a segment on his television show about Edwards, he presented his predecessor with a video tape of the show.

When Edwards admitted he didn’t own a video cassette recorder, dozens of his former players chipped in to buy him one, then all showed up at practice one day at Carter-Finley Stadium to present it to him. Some came as far away as Seattle for the impromptu reunion.

That they repaid him in a small way was a testament to the discipline he expected from them. He demanded that academics be placed first, and more than 90 percent of all the players he recruited graduated from NC State.

Shortly after he died on Feb. 25, 1997, at the age of 88, his ashes were spread on the field at the stadium the former engineer worked so hard to build.

Exactly a half century after he retired, Edwards remains relevant to the football program. Everyone who enters the north end of Carter-Finley walks through a brick archway recognizing Edwards as the architect and founder of NC State’s football success.

The entrance to the North End Zone features the "Earle Edwards Walk of Champions." (Tim Peeler)

And current players benefit from his legacy. In 2000, not long after former Edwards linebacker Chuck Amato became head coach, more than 100 players pooled their money together to contribute more than $100,000 to establish the Earle Edwards Endowment, the Wolfpack Club’s first permanent crowd-funded endowment named for a former NC State coach.

Even more, the forward-thinking Edwards is still a distant voice for the college game that he loved. He often proselytized for and improved on his former boss Duffy Daugherty’s proposal for an eight-team college football championship, something many coaches, athletics directors and presidents resisted for decades.

Daugherty’s model used existing bowl games to host the playoffs, with the major bowls rotating the semifinals and championship game. Edwards thought there should be more than eight teams. Sound familiar?

“Why not have 16 teams in the playoffs?” Edwards asked in a 1966 speech to the Wolfpack Club. “The season ends the last Saturday in November, at least it normally does, although several teams might play into November to be on national television.

“All the major conference champions would qualify, much like basketball and baseball … There are some conferences that should have more than the champion.

“I just think it would be more fair to start with 16 teams. That should certainly be a cross-section of the nation’s best.”

For those who played for Edwards, he is still remembered as the person who put them on a pathway to success. For Wolfpack football fans old and new, he remains the person most responsible for giving the program an opportunity to succeed.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.