In 1986, NC State upset Clemson in a game to remember
Sometimes, football is predictably boring. You know what’s going to happen before the ball is even teed up on a Saturday afternoon.
Players, coaches, fans — everyone kind of goes through the motions.
Sometimes, though, wonderfully unpredictable things happen on the football field, and it keeps us coming back week after week after week. Maybe it’s a game against evenly matched ranked teams. Maybe it’s a rivalry game that ends up in your favor. Maybe it’s an upset.
NC State fans have seen plenty of the latter through the years, and they are always sweeter than winning the games that you are supposed to win. That’s why so many thousands of people stayed in Carter-Finley Stadium last Saturday to watch the Wolfpack beat Notre Dame 10-3 during the heavy downpour that arrived with Hurricane Matthew.
No one who was there — and the hundreds of thousands of people who will claim they were there in future years — will ever forget the experience.
It’s been 30 years since the most memorable game of my college experience, and there are few details that I’ve forgotten. The 1986 football season, head coach Dick Sheridan’s inaugural year at NC State, was one of the most unusual, exciting and unpredictable in school history. It’s been boiled down to the great catch Danny Peebles made from an Erik Kramer Hail Mary pass with no time left on the clock, perhaps the greatest play in the 51-year history of Carter-Finley.
But it was the game before that was even more important for the program. It happened to be against this weekend’s opponent, Clemson, a team that has won 11 of its last 12 games against the Wolfpack.
Wins against the Tigers — the most perennially ranked opponent the Wolfpack has faced through the years — are always enjoyable and memorable. At one time, the Pack was considered a nemesis to the Tigers’ chances at winning an ACC title, a fear that was crystalized on sports talk radio show I once heard just before the 1998 game at Memorial Stadium (a game NC State won 46-39), “I’m a little worried about NC State. They’ve always been our Hercules heel.”
(So close, so perfect.)
Anyway, the 1986 game pitted the 20th-ranked Wolfpack against Danny Ford’s 16th-ranked Tigers. Clemson was trying to reclaim the ACC title after three straight years of seeing it go to Maryland, including in 1983 when the Tigers were undefeated in league play but ineligible for the conference title because of ACC sanctions.
The Wolfpack, coming off three consecutive 3-8 seasons under Tom Reed, was trying to prove that Sheridan’s debut was no fluke after fluky wins over Wake Forest, Maryland and North Carolina, with a loss to Georgia Tech mixed in.
The game was so attractive that ABC picked it up for its regional broadcast. The network sent Brent Musburger, Ara Parseghian and John Dockery down to call the game. They needed some locals to help with the production team, and I was one of a dozen or so who worked in the trucks and in the press box.
I tagged along with Dockery over to the North Carolina State Fair, which had started that weekend, for a pregame segment. He found an unusual food-on-a-stick to take back to Musburger, something the veteran broadcaster had never seen before and was unsure he wanted to actually eat.
Was it one of those exotic deep-fried concoctions the fair is famous for? Nope, it was a corndog.
There was no reason for Sheridan and his team to think they could win the game. Even in the best conditions, the Tigers were likely better. When the forecast called for rain throughout the day, it further dampened the Pack’s hopes.
Then, on Saturday morning, as rain and thunder rolled into West Raleigh, Sheridan made the surprising announcement that his leading receiver, sophomore Nasrallah Worthen, would miss the game because of a hamstring injury he suffered in practice that week.
That whittled the receiving corps down to juniors Haywood Jeffires and Danny Peebles. All they did was give the Wolfpack the offense it needed to win the game. Jeffires opened the game with a 2-yard touchdown pass from Erik Kramer. Peebles added a 50-yard touchdown reception in the second quarter.
Then, early in the third quarter, the two combined for one of the best plays rain-soaked fans ever saw in Carter-Finley. Jeffires came around the end on a reverse, Peebles sprung him with a great block and he raced away on a 62-yard touchdown romp.
“Oh my, has Coach Sheridan turned this program around,” Musburger yelled into his microphone.
Not to be left out of the fun, athletics director and men’s basketball coach Jim Valvano joined Musburger and Parseghian in the broadcast booth and took credit for everything: hiring Sheridan, summoning the two inches of rain that fell on the stadium that day and suggesting the reverse call to the football coaching staff at their weekly Wednesday night dinner at Amedeo’s.
Begrudgingly, Valvano did offer this bit of understatement.
“Dick Sheridan is the best football coach in the country,” Valvano said as the Wolfpack rolled to a 27-3 victory, thanks to a pair of touchdowns by Jeffires, one by Peebles and two Mike Cofer field goals.
They were the big play guys that stole some of the glory from running backs Bobby Crumpler and Mal Crite, who had the bulk of the Wolfpack’s 253 rushing yards against a Clemson defense that had allowed only 77 yards per game to that point in the season.
The real story of the game was the Wolfpack defense, which entered the game last in the ACC in yards and points allowed. That day, however, it stymied the Tigers in the sloppy conditions behind the play of junior linebacker Pat Teague, fill-in junior linebacker Fred Stone and freshman defensive lineman Ray Agnew.
There have been bigger wins over the Tigers in a series that dates back to 1899 and has been played in exotic locations like Florence, Rock Hill and Columbia. There’s no question that the 38-6 victory in 2002 that pushed Chuck Amato and his team to 9-0 — the best start to a season in school history — was certainly more important and maybe even more dominating.
That ’86 version of the Textile Bowl, though, will always be special to me. My folks were there, drenched in the rain. I saw the game from behind the scenes for a network television broadcast. Steve Spurrier, who had played at Carter Stadium in its inaugural year of 1966, was there to scout it for the Hall of Fame Bowl. Valvano was hosting a bunch of basketball recruits in his AD box. One of them, a point guard from Miami named Chris Corchiani, committed to the Wolfpack on the spot.
And, even better for me, I left Carter-Finley Stadium that evening sure I would see my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, finally break the Curse of the Bambino and win their first championship since 1918. I was as sure about that as I was about the hands of Boston first baseman Bill Buckner.
Well, sometimes unexpected things happen.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.