NC State and Wake Forest have limited history of football season openers

Weird things happen on opening day.

Maybe that’s why frequent foes NC State and Wake Forest, which have the third-oldest continuous rivalry in college football, have rarely begun a football season by facing each other, as they will do in NC State’s season-opener on Saturday at 8 p.m. at Carter-Finley Stadium.

The empty-stadium contest between the one-time Wake County neighbors will be just the sixth time in 114 meetings that State will begin a season against the Demon Deacons. Wake has already played a game this yearn, having lost its opener against top-ranked Clemson, 37-13, last weekend. Saturday will be the Wolfpack’s first game of 2020, thanks to a COVID-19 related postponement of its originally scheduled opener against Virginia Tech.

And if you think this contest — to be played without spectators, mostly without media and entirely without scorching noon-time heat and humidity — will be weird, it probably won’t be any worse than a couple of the most unusual season-opening games in the history of the series that were played a half century ago.

When Wake opened $3.9 million Groves Stadium in 1968, it asked NC State to be the first opponent in the inaugural game at the new complex near downtown Winston-Salem, the first permanent home venue for the school that moved from the town of Wake Forest near Raleigh to the middle of the state in 1956.

And while the stadium, modeled loosely on NC State’s own newly opened Carter Stadium, was lovely, the first game was marred by an unfortunate number of mistakes. Wake Forest lost four fumbles and threw an interception on its new turf.

NC State All-American kicker Gerald Warren, who set an NCAA record with 17 field goals on 22 attempts in 1967, missed his first four field goal attempts on the day,and another one later in the game, matching the five misses he had throughout the previous season.

However, his four points on a 34-yarder and the extra point after the Pack’s only touchdown, were the difference in the game.

Heading into the final two minutes of the game, State led by a slim 3-0 margin. Warren missed a 50-yard attempt midway through the fourth that would have doubled the Pack’s lead. The Wolfpack finally entered the stadium’s gleaming, unused end zone on a one-yard touchdown run by quarterback Jack Klebe with 1:53 remaining in the game.

Wake reached the other end zone shortly thereafter, but after the final seconds ticked off the clock. The Deacons threw a 17-yard pass at the goal line as time expired. However, the Wolfpack was called for pass interference. Given an extra play from scrimmage, Wake finally scored on a 1-yard run by Lee Clymer that prevented a shutout, like the first two season-opening games in the series. State won 25-0 in 1908 and 51-0 in 1914 in those ancient contests.

It was an exasperating day for Warren, who entered the game as the top kicker in the nation, only to miss attempts from, in order, 48, 36, 46, 36 and 50 yards.

“Maybe I’ve had too much publicity,” said the Elizabeth City, N.C., native after the game, “and I thought I was better than I was. I have no excuses. I didn’t do it right, and they didn’t go through. I missed three by about a foot. They could have gone one way or the other. I missed a couple from distances I’ve never missed from before in a game.

"It’s quite exasperating. I’m glad Coach [Earle] Edwards and Coach [Ernie] Driscoll had enough faith in me to keep letting me try again.”

After beating the Deacons in 1968, Edwards and his squad went on to win the ACC championship, the last of his five titles in his 18-year tenure at State. The two teams met again to open the 1969 season in Raleigh, with the Wolfpack heavily favored in the game and picked to win their fifth ACC title of the decade.

That game was just as unusual and also went down to the final seconds. The Wolfpack led the entire way against the Deacons and its rookie head coach Cal Stoll – until quarterback Freddie Summers scored on a 1-yard run with five seconds to play. The Deacons then surprised everyone in the crowd with a successful two-point conversion pass to give Stoll his first career win.

The Pack won its next two games, but faced a brutal four-game road schedule in late September and early October, and won just one more game that season. After a second consecutive three-win season in 1970, Edwards retired from his post.

The most recent time the two teams met to start the season was in 1974 in Winston-Salem, when head coach Lou Holtz’s defending ACC champs rolled over the Deacons 33-15, thanks to two passing touchdowns and a rushing touchdown by quarterback Dave Buckey. The game marked the debut of freshman quarterback Johnny Evans, who scored his first career touchdown on a 9-yard run in the fourth quarter.

The series against Wake actually began in 1895 with a 4-4 tie in Raleigh — back when the two schools were both located in Wake County — but was interrupted for 13 years when both schools joined a number of universities across the nation to disband their programs because of increased danger to participants.

NC State’s ban lasted less than a year, but Wake Forest didn’t resume playing football until 1908, when it lost two games to NC State by a combined score of 101-0 (25-0 and 76-0, respectively). After taking a year off, the series has been played every year since 1910, including a 21-0 NC State loss to Wake at the end of the Spanish flu/World War I-affected 1918 season, in which State lost its final three games by a combined score of 174-0.

During World War II, with teams staying closer to home, the nearby rivals continued to meet, even though both UNC and Duke stopped playing State And Wake because its U.S. military trainees weren’t allowed to participate in varsity athletics, while those at the other two schools were.

The Demon Deacons maintained a wartime advantage with two wins and a tie. As schedules changed through the years, State and Wake rarely opened the season against one another, mainly because the game used to be the featured attraction at the mid-October North Carolina State Fair, both when the fairgrounds were across the street from State’s campus and when the Wolfpack moved down Hillsborough Street to Carter Stadium in 1966.

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

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