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State of Alabama has been kind to NC State

Former NC State assistant coach Joe Pate, who created quite a recruiting trail between Alabama and NC State for three head coaches, was in the stands at Denny Stadium on Oct. 10, 1964, when the Earle Edwards-coached Wolfpack faced Joe Namath and Alabama in a matchup of eventual conference champions from the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Southeastern Conference.
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The upstart Wolfpack, ranked No. 12 in the national coaches poll, was visiting the mighty Crimson Tide, which would eventually be recognized as national champions later that year after an undefeated regular season.
Back then, the Wolfpack made several trips to Alabama and the Gulf Coast region, playing in Tuscaloosa in 1961 and '64 and making frequent trips to face Mississippi Southern, including a 1961 game in Mobile.
Namath, a brash-talking scrambler from Beaver Falls, Pa., was a senior who was already poised to become a professional superstar, causing a bidding war later on between the NFL and the AFL.
Namath chose not to tape his ankles before the game, and early in the second quarter he suffered the first of a long line of knee injuries that plagued him throughout his career. Future Duke football coach Steve Sloan came off the bench and led his team to all three touchdowns in the 21-0 victory.
(Namath re-aggravated the injury, which was bad enough to keep him out of Vietnam but not the AFL, before the Orange Bowl and the Tide, already declared national champions by both major polls, lost to Texas.)
Pate, who grew up in Ashford, Ala., was a senior in high school, about to enroll at the University of Alabama. Little did he know that he would end up having a profound influence on the fortunes of the Crimson Tide's opponent that early October afternoon.
As the current NC State team prepares to head to Mobile to face South Alabama on Saturday, Pate reminisced about going back to his home state to find dozens of talented players who either weren't recruited by Alabama or Auburn (or were recruited to become tight ends) and luring them to Raleigh for head coaches Dick Sheridan, Mike O'Cain and Chuck Amato.
In its first nine decades of football, NC State rarely ever brought in players from the deep southern states, especially after the SEC was formed in 1933. Edwards, the winningest coach in NC State football history, spent his out-of-state recruiting efforts in Pennsylvania in the 1950s and '60s. Lou Holtz, Bo Rein, Monte Kiffin and Tom Reed all drew players from Ohio and the Tidewater area of Virginia after taking their pick of North Carolina players in the 1970s and '80s.
It wasn't until Pate arrived as Dick Sheridan's original defensive coordinator in 1986 that the Wolfpack began drawing players from Alabama, beginning with defensive lineman Kenny Fondren of Hartford in Sheridan's first recruiting class. Pate, a high school coach in northern Alabama for nearly a decade, had recruited his home state for seven years as the defensive coordinator at Tennessee-Chattanooga and maintained strong ties to his high school coaching friends.
Sheridan's second class included three Alabama natives who eventually became starters: All-ACC cornerback Fernandus "Snake" Vinson, safety James Foshee of Montgomery and linebacker Lee Knight of Huntsville.
"It was just natural for me to recruit that area," says Pate, who retired in 2006 and still lives in the Raleigh area. "NC State always had a good reputation in the state, academically and as a good place to go. I just knew a lot of the coaches, especially ones whose opinions I valued, not only on their players but on other peoples' players at other schools.
"The first really, really good player we got from there was Fernandus Vinson. Auburn had offered him, but he and his mom wanted him to go out of state, and once he came it became easier to bring others. Most years we could get one or two players from down there."
The deep recruiting corridor lasted until Pate left for Arkansas from 1990-96, but it didn't take long for it to start back when he returned to Raleigh in 1996 under O'Cain. He was famously asked by then-athletics director Les Robinson to stay on to handle recruiting duties after O'Cain was fired following the 1999 season. He had already targeted the Wolfpack's quarterback of the future in Athens, Ala., the hometown of Pate's wife.
The young player was the son of Athens High head coach Steve Rivers, whom Pate knew from his earliest days in coaching near Austin and Decatur. It was Pate's efforts in retaining Philip, whom Auburn wanted as either a linebacker or tight end, that brought not only the most successful passing quarterback in ACC history to Raleigh, but also his most frequent target and the school's all-time leading receiver, Jerricho Cotchery.
Cotchery had played against Rivers in the Alabama high school playoffs and was an AAU basketball star. He hadn't attended football camps at either Auburn or Alabama, and those schools had no interest in recruiting him.
"I'll never forget what Steve Rivers said about Jerricho: 'If y'all can get that kid, then take him because he reminds me of the receivers at Florida State,'" Pate says.
At one time, there were more Alabama natives on NC State's roster than any state other than North Carolina or Florida. Besides Rivers and Cotchery, the teams that won both the Gator Bowl over Notre Dame and the Tangerine Bowl over Kansas had linebackers Corrie Dawson and Avery Gibson, offensive lineman James Newby and fullback Cotra Jackson.
That all but stopped, however, after Pate left the program in Amato's final years. Head coach Tom O'Brien signed just two players from Alabama in his six years at NC State, linebacker Hans Rice of Eufaula and defensive tackle Carlos Gray of Pinson. Neither stayed in the program for more than two years.
Third-year coach Dave Doeren has made a few initial steps into Alabama. His Northern Illinois teams had three starters in the secondary from Alabama, and he took that team into Mobile's Ladd Peebles Stadium (site of Saturday's matchup against South Alabama) for the 2012 GoDaddy.com Bowl, beating Arkansas State 38-20.
"Once I got here, we spent some time recruiting in Alabama, but we haven't gotten anyone from there yet," Doeren says. "The caliber of players we are looking for are prone to stay in the SEC. It's hard to get them out of there. Our resources are better spent in Florida and Georgia because players are more apt to leave those states.
"But there is definitely great talent in Alabama."
Pate's only suggestion is to keep at it, because there are still plenty of high school coaches there that remember the opportunities NC State provided for some of their native sons.
"There are always good players that Alabama and Auburn don't sign," Pate says. "There are kids who don't want to stay in the state. There are still a lot of high school coaches who remember what Jerricho and Philip did at NC State.
"The thing I do know about Alabama is that if a guy wants to stay in state and he has the opportunity, that's what he is going to do. But there are plenty of other really good ones who would just as soon come to Raleigh as they would Athens or Starkville or wherever."
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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