August is the longest month for football fans.
It’s tantalizingly close to the beginning of the season, but filled with long summer days, with a lot of near-news, depth-chart changes, manufactured stories about who might do what over the coming four months and semi-educated guesses on the season’s outcome.
It’s a month of conjecture overload and impatient waiting for the arrival of tickets, making preliminary tailgating plans and spending time reading daily updates that never seem to give quite enough information.
Imagine, however, a preseason camp of a different sort, one with a new coach, a new style of play and the possibility of two quarterbacks bolting for baseball.
That’s what happened 25 years ago, when successful head coach Dick Sheridan unexpectedly resigned on June 30, 1993, citing health reasons. He didn’t name a successor, but recommended three of his assistants — defensive coordinator Buddy Green, offensive coordinator Ted Cain and quarterbacks coach Mike O’Cain — as candidates for the job to athletics director Todd Turner.
Sheridan knew at the end of spring practice that he would not return as head coach. No one knew then and most still don’t know now the exact diagnosis that caused his resignation, but it wasn’t solely for the colon infection that has since been treated and cured.
“It was a difficult decision, but I knew I didn’t have the energy level I needed to go on as football coach,” Sheridan said this week. “It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. I just wasn’t up to full speed.
“I can’t believe that was 25 years ago.”
Sheridan wanted to prevent his staff from having to look for new jobs and the possibility of being uprooted from Raleigh at such a late date, so he waited until the last possible minute to announce his departure. Turner chose O’Cain to take over Sheridan’s program.
Just a few weeks earlier, two of the three Wolfpack’s quarterback possibilities were taken in Major League Baseball’s June draft of amateur players — first-round pick Trot Nixon and 18th-round pick Terry Harvey.
Nixon, the seventh overall pick by the Boston Red Sox, had played at the same high school as Wolfpack All-America quarterback Roman Gabriel and Duke standout Sonny Jurgenson. And Nixon, a stellar centerfielder and pitcher, had just led his New Hanover High team to the North Carolina Class 4A state championship, with the title game played at NC State’s Doak Field. It capped off a senior season in which the Baseball America High School Player of the Year hit .519 with 12 home runs and 56 runs batted in, and posted a 12-0 pitching record.
Harvey, who had been drafted out of high school by the New York Yankees, was selected again by the Bronx Bombers following his sophomore season at NC State, in which he went 10-3 and threw the only no-hitter ever against Florida State.
There was never really any chance that Harvey, who had filled in as the Pack’s starting quarterback during the 9-3-1 1992 season, would sign with the Yankees. The signing money wasn’t good enough, Harvey wanted to spend the summer playing with Team USA, and he had a strong chance to become the Wolfpack’s starting quarterback, along with Geoff Bender and Nixon.
“It was a pretty good deal for me that season,” Harvey said. “I was looking forward to the Team USA travel and for the football season. We were coming off back-to-back nine-win seasons, and we thought the transition to Coach O’Cain would go pretty smooth.”
For months, Nixon had stated his desire to go to college and play both sports, which Gabriel had done at NC State. Gabriel, the two-time ACC Player of the Year and All-America quarterback for head coach Earle Edwards, also played two varsity seasons for Vic Sorrell’s baseball team, leading the Wolfpack in home runs and RBIs as a junior.
Nixon came to preseason camp and showed up every morning at 7:30 a.m. to begin two-a-day workouts, knowing he had until the first day of classes to make his final decision about signing with the Red Sox.
“He was out there before everybody else,” Harvey recalled. “Geoff and I kept asking him ‘What the hell are you doing here? There’s not a zero round of the baseball draft. You won’t ever be taken higher. Go play baseball.’”
Two weeks into camp, and the day NC State fall semester classes began Aug. 25, 1993, Nixon and the Red Sox came to terms, with a signing bonus that was reported to be between $850,000 and $1.2 million.
“I looked at myself as a good college quarterback, but my heart was more geared towards baseball,” Nixon told Roman Gabriel III in a 2012 interview.
“I never aspired to be a professional football quarterback … I just wanted to be one of those college players who went to bowl games every year and won national titles.”
That didn’t happen at NC State, but Nixon did all right for himself and the city of Boston. He spent five years in the minors, with two brief stints in the majors. He was called up for good in 1999, and became a Red Sox fan favorite for his scrappy style of play in right field.
He helped the team get to the American League Championship Series in 2003. In the following injury-plagued season, Nixon returned just in time for another playoff run, helping the Bosox reach the 2004 World Series.
In the decisive game, Nixon hit a two-out, two-run double that scored the final runs in the 3-0 victory that ended the 86-year-old “Curse of the Bambino.”
Once Nixon's decision was settled, the other two quarterbacks split time under center. Bender, a junior from Pittsburgh, started the first five games, while Harvey, the sophomore from Dacula, Ga., started the final seven contests, including the Hall of Fame Bowl loss to Michigan.
O’Cain’s first season ended with a 7-5 record. The Wolfpack came back the next season, with Harvey starting 10 of 12 games and rebounding from both a broken cheekbone and separated shoulder, to post a 9-3 overall record and a 6-2, second-place finish in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
"That preseason was a little wild," says O'Cain, who is now retired from football and living in his hometown of Orangeburg, South Carolina. "I was fortunate to have a great staff who had been there a long time to make it an easier transition, but organizationally, you don't know what all there is to do until you are wearing those head coaching shoes.
"You have to talk to players, administrators, fans, staff, sportswriters, radio guys, all those things you never dealt with when you were an assistant."
It didn't help, he says, that there were some supporters who weren't happy with his selection.
"We made the best of it," said O'Cain."I had a great staff and some really good quarterbacks, which made everything easier."
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