The history behind the NC State-East Carolina rivalry

The 1999 football season was quite remarkable. East Carolina’s football team came to Carter-Finley Stadium for a major upset early in the season, and then the Pirates beat NC State at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium in Greenville in the regular-season finale for both teams in what was called at the time “the biggest event to ever happen east of Interstate-95.”

The first game was an act of good will by NC State: East Carolina’s campus had been devastated by floods from Hurricane Floyd. Dowdy-Ficklen was partially underwater. Greenville was still without power. So NC State offered up its stadium for the Pirates to host No. 9 Miami in a nationally televised game.

The Pirate football team, having stayed in Columbia, S.C., for most of the storm’s aftermath, beat the Hurricanes 27-23, lifting the spirits of the entire waterlogged region with one of the biggest upsets and emotionally gratifying victories in school history.

It was one of the biggest wins of the Steve Logan era at East Carolina — at least until NC State traveled down Highway 64 to Greenville later that season.

Let’s remember the circumstances of that historic game. No, the North Carolina General Assembly did not force both NC State and North Carolina, the two largest schools in the UNC system, to go to Greenville to play the Pirates. That would have been even more humiliating for the Pirates, who had long considered themselves to be the one-eyed stepchildren of the state’s football fans because of their treatment by the bigger schools.

Beginning in 1970, only a few years after ECU began playing football, NC State had hosted the Pirates in Carter and Carter-Finley Stadium. It didn’t take long for ECU to have success there. The Pirates beat the Al Michaels-coached Wolfpack in 1971 and won back-to-back games over Bo Rein-coach teams in 1976 and ’77.

But the games were always in Raleigh.

North Carolina hosted the Pirates from 1972-81, but then took 20 years off from the series. All those early games were in Chapel Hill.

East Carolina had steadily grown into the third largest school in the UNC system through the 1970s and ‘80s, and received a fair amount of affirmation as a university when it opened the system’s second medical school and a regional hospital in 1974.

But many wanted them to be on the same football footing with their larger counterparts. So in the early 1990s, a small group of state senators from eastern counties, led by Democrat Ed Warren of Pitt County, banded together and hinted they would support funding cuts for campus building projects in Raleigh and Chapel Hill.

In 1995, NC State chancellor Larry Monteith and athletics director Todd Turner and North Carolina chancellor Paul Hardin and athletics director John Swofford quickly came to terms with East Carolina administration for both schools to play in Greenville.

“It sort of all came together,’’ Warren said in a 1999 interview. “We didn’t tell anybody that they had to do anything. I didn’t particularly want us to have to make up legislation.

“We eventually had some good discussions, and we were able to get it done.”

For Warren — and many purple-and-gold followers in the eastern part of the state — it was further validation for the football program, and an end, they hoped, to East Carolina’s inferiority complex and NC State and North Carolina’s feelings of superiority.

“This game advances East Carolina to another level,” Warren said back then. “It always seemed to me that the eastern part of the state has gotten the short end of things. Games like this were always played in Raleigh or Chapel Hill, where they believed they had elite universities. They always got the millions of dollars these games generate added to their tax base, which didn’t seem fair to me.

“Well, now we are in the same elite class with them.”

It’s a valid feeling. The NC State-East Carolina game in 1999 drew the largest crowd ever for recently expanded Dowdy-Ficklen, all of whom were thrilled when the Pirates won 23-6.

Since then, East Carolina owns a 4-3 advantage in the series. North Carolina resumed its rivalry with the Pirates in 2001 and went to Greenville for the first time ever in 2003. The Tar Heels own a 6-3 mark in the series since then, but have lost the last the last two meetings, 55-31 in Chapel Hill in 2013 and 70-41 in Greenville in 2014.

For the Wolfpack, putting ECU back on the schedule was a bit painful. The two neighboring schools, so close and similar in many ways, had suffered through a rough patch in the 1980s, following two near riots after the Pirates won games in Carter-Finley in 1985 and ’87.

Those late-starting games came at the end of long sessions of tailgating in the State Fairgrounds parking lots, and fans from both schools, so friendly to each other before the games, could get emotional afterwards.

After ECU’s 32-14 win in 1987, some 2,000 fans rushed down the hill in the south end zone, knocked over a fence and tore down the nearest goal post. A total of 35 injuries, including an assault on a public safety officer, were reported after the game. Shortly after, athletics director Jim Valvano canceled all future games in the series.

(Side note: One of the people on the Post-Game Victory Celebration Task Force assembled in 1986 to combat out-of-control celebrations after football games was NC State assistant director of housing and residence life, Jeff Compher, who is now East Carolina’s athletics director.)

Valvano’s ban didn’t last long, however. The Peach Bowl paired the two rivals against each other on New Year’s Day 1992, with East Carolina surging back in the second half for a 37-34 victory over Dick Sheridan’s Wolfpack.

The next step came with a neutral-site game in Charlotte in 1996, which East Carolina won 50-29. When the Pirates won in 1999 in Greenville, it gave them their longest winning streak in the series history at three in a row.

NC State ended that with a 52-14 win in Charlotte in 2004. The two schools signed a six-game home-and-home contract following that game, beginning with a contest at Carter-Finley in 2006 that East Carolina won 21-16.

NC State has followed with trips to Greenville in 2007, 2010 and this season. Two more future games are slated for 2019 in Raleigh and 2022 in Greenville.

What will happen after that? NC State athletics director Debbie Yow says she will leave up to her successor whether the two sister institutions continue to play.

“I think it’s only fair for whoever comes after me to make that decision,” she said.

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