In 1927, a win over South Carolina gave NCSU a unique league title

NC State’s only Southern Conference football championship was delivered on the broad shoulders of College Football Hall of Famer Jack McDowall. The details of that championship season, however, are fuzzy to generations of Wolfpack fans nine decades later.

Sure, the fleet-footed McDowall, voted the top athlete in the school’s first 75 years, was inducted into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame, in addition to the National Football Foundation’s College Hall that recently opened in downtown Atlanta.

What else would you expect for an All-Southern Conference player who was so fast “he could run through a rainstorm and come home dry,” as the papers of his day often reported?

His individual heroics that season now outshine the team accomplishment, in which coach Gus Tebell’s squad posted a 9-1 overall record and an unbeaten and untied 4-0 league mark. (That “untied” part is important, and we’ll get to that in a moment.)

At the time, the Southern Conference was an amalgam of 22 football schools in the South, including the forerunners of the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference. With such a large number of teams, there was no balanced schedules, nor were there divisions to determine a champion. That was generally decided by sportswriters of the day or various rating systems that took into account strength of schedule and other factors.

The SoCon included coach Kid Woodruff’s Georgia Bulldogs, which billed itself as the “Team of Dream and Wonder.” Woodruff was a part-time coach who earned a $1 a year salary from the school, and the full-time owner of a successful Columbus, Georgia, insurance agency. In 1927 — his final season as a coach — he had one of the best college teams ever assembled, thanks to his implementation of a Notre Dame system. He even had one of the famed Four Horsemen, Jim Crowley, as an assistant coach.

The Bulldogs allowed just 10 points, all against Yale, in the first seven games of the season and had shutouts against Virginia, Furman, Auburn, at Tulane, at Florida and Clemson. Georgia, easily considered the best team in the nation after beating Yale early in the season, won their next two games against Mercer and at Alabama, despite giving up a touchdown in each contest.

But the Bulldogs did not win the Southern Conference title. Who actually did is still up for debate, and NC State is one of three teams technically considered co-champions with others that did not lose a league game that season.

Georgia Tech, Tennessee and Vanderbilt were also undefeated against league opponents, but Tech’s Golden Hurricane (7-0-1) and Tennessee’s Volunteers (5-0-1) tied Vanderbilt (5-0-2) in their regular-season matchups, throwing a wrench into the league’s mile-long standings.

Tebell, who served as State’s basketball and football coach, was trying to build a powerhouse football program in Raleigh. Before the season, he and his assistant coaches moved into the Fourth Dormitory (nicknamed “The Bloody Fourth” for its history of hazing) to live with the players. He closed practices because too many alumni and community members were coming out to watch his team prepare for the coming season, which he expected to be his best of his tenure in Raleigh.

He had great support from a football-devoted athletic administration: Tal Stafford, former football and baseball coach at the school, was the graduate manager of athletics, and one of the members of the athletics council was an assistant professor of civil engineering. L.E. Wooten, who later in his life owned the company that built Carter Stadium in 1966.

There was much anticipation about Tebell’s “Lean Gray Wolves” taking to Riddick field when the season began with a 39-0 victory over Elon. There was disappointment the next week when Tebell and his team suffered a 20-0 loss at non-conference foe Furman, but that turned out to be the only blemish on the team’s season.

Back then, State College was more concerned about winning North Carolina’s Big Five state championship, a round-robin between NC State, North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest and Davidson. Only the Wolfpack and Tar Heels, at the time, were members of the Southern Conference.

McDowall had a 68-yard punt return for a touchdown against Wake Forest in a 30-7 win. He was the star in wins over the Tar Heels, against Florida in Tampa and against Davidson in a game played at Greensboro’s Memorial Stadium. In the game against his hometown Gators, the Gainesville, Florida, native returned an interception for 75 yards against a team that refused to offer him a scholarship. And against Davidson, he had two 65-yard touchdown runs in the fourth quarter to secure the victory.

When McDowall led the Pack to a 20-18 victory over college powerhouse Duke with a 73-yard punt, a 35-yard touchdown pass and a pair of point-scoring dropkicks, the next day’s headlines blared that the Wolfpack had won the state title in what the NC State yearbook called “probably the most spectacular football game that has ever been fought in North Carolina.”

Some 300 college students rushed a temporary gate at Duke’s Haynes Field for the opportunity to see the game, protesting the price of admission to the game.

The following week, McDowall dominated in a 34-0 Thanksgiving Day victory over South Carolina in Columbia, the final of its four Southern Conference games that season. Barely a peep was made about a possible league title.

That’s because it wasn’t until early December that Georgia Tech pulled off the most stunning upset of the 1927, beating top-ranked Georgia 12-0 on a rain-soaked field in Atlanta. It threw the final standings in turmoil, but the Wolfpack made a legitimate claim to the Southern Conference title and has been recognized with Tech and Tennessee as co-champions ever since.

“The Wolfpack of State College stand out as the vanquisher and the conquerors — and justly so,” wrote the editors of the yearbook.

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