Coming off the biggest win of head coach Dave Doeren’s NC State career, Wolfpack football gets to do it all over again. That’s the great thing about college football — the season is filled with multiple opportunities to validate preceding successes or failures.
What happens next is critical to sustained success.
Following Saturday’s dramatic 27-21 double-overtime victory over No. 9 Clemson, NC State football has won 12 times and tied once against teams ranked in the top 10 of the weekly Associated Press poll since its inception in 1938.
In the games that followed, however, the Wolfpack owns a 6-6-1 record, meaning it has made the trip from the highest high to the lowest low a half dozen times. Most famous was the 1998 loss at Baylor that followed the Wolfpack’s 24-7 win over No. 2 Florida State.
Few remember, though, that the week after that, the Wolfpack scored another home win over No. 11 Syracuse and its Heisman Trophy hopeful quarterback Donovan McNabb. The Wolfpack went on to participate in the MicronPC Bowl, where it lost 46-23 to Miami.
This is when it should always be stipulated that a statistic like this has nothing to do with the current team. There is no trend to identify. However, it’s always nice to have some historical perspective for the program.
Doeren knows that Saturday against Louisiana Tech is a test of maturity for this year’s team.
“This game is about getting better than we were last week,” Doeren said on Monday. “That’s our goal, to be a great football team. Great teams don’t step backwards.”
He vowed “to be all over” his team this week to ensure a step backwards doesn’t happen.
“As great as that win was … we have to win every game,” Doeren said. “The next game is the one you have to worry the most about. This is the next game. I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t come out and play very good football.”
That happened in both 2011 and 2012, when head coach Tom O’Brien and quarterback Mike Glennon led the Wolfpack to wins over Maryland twice, once after beating Clemson and then against after knocking off Florida State the next year, both top 10 teams at the time.
The first of those wins over the Terrapins featured the greatest comeback in school history, rallying from down 27 points in the third quarter to win 56-41 thanks to six unanswered Wolfpack touchdowns in the second half. The latter, NC State survived by the skin of its teeth when Maryland missed a 32-yard field goal that hit off the left upright with two seconds left.
Strangely, five of NC State's 13 games following wins or ties over top 10 teams would be against the Terrapins. The Pack went 3-2 in those games vs. Maryland, with one of the losses coming to a top-10 ranked Terrapin squad itself in 2001 with Philip Rivers at quarterback, further solidifying Maryland as Rivers' nemesis in his four years in Raleigh.
Responding with another win after such success didn’t happen under the tenures of coaches Chuck Amato, Mike O’Cain and Dick Sheridan. Sheridan actually beat a nationally top 10 ranked Clemson squad in back-to-back years in 1987 and 1988, then lost decisively to the Tigers' in-state archrival South Carolina the following week both times.
College Football Hall of Fame inductee Lou Holtz was 1-0-1 in the aftermath of beating top 10 Penn State in back-to-back seasons, whipping Arizona State on the road in 1974 and tying Duke in 1975.
Head coach Earle Edwards had more success against top 10 teams than any other coach in school history, beating No. 2 Houston in 1967, No. 10 North Carolina in 1958 and tying No. 4 Duke in 1957.
The win over the Tar Heels was Edwards’ third in a row against ballyhooed coach “Sunny” Jim Tatum, who had come back to his UNC alma mater after five years at Maryland. The tie over Duke, played at Riddick Stadium, was program defining for a school that had been beaten frequently by the Blue Devils.
The latter two outcomes over local rivals were particularly important in establishing Edwards’ successful career with the Wolfpack, and beating Wake Forest after the 14-14 Duke tie in 1957 went a long way in securing NC State’s first Atlantic Coast Conference championship.
The first-ever win over a top 10 team was also the first televised game in NC State history, a 16-13 victory at Maryland, which was also coached by Tatum at the time.
The Wolfpack, which had lost three of its first four games that season, followed up beating the Terrapins with a win over Virginia Tech, but finished the season 5-4-1 and did not qualify for a postseason game, the first of four times the program has not participated in a bowl during a season in which it beat a top 10 team.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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