For being practically neighbors, NC State and West Virginia have a sparse athletics rivalry. The two former members of the Southern Conference never met in a league game on the football field, and faced each other just once in a SoCon basketball game.
Saturday’s game is a regular-season rarity for the two schools, whose first game goes back to 1914 at NC State’s Riddick Field.
But in the postseason, the Wolfpack and Mountaineers are practically best friends, having played each other three times, in the 1972 and ’75 Peach Bowls in Atlanta and the 2010 Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando.
For both teams, that’s the most they’ve ever faced the same team in the postseason. (West Virginia has also played Florida State three times.)
The first two of those meetings were classics, featuring a pair of college football legends. Lou Holtz was in his first year at NC State when he took the Wolfpack to face Bobby Bowden’s Mountaineers on Dec. 31, 1972.
The two coaches were friendly, though the Wolfpack head coach still stung from a 43-7 beatdown Bowden’s Mountaineers handed his William & Mary team in the 1970 season-opener.
“We had too many Marys and not enough Williams,” Holtz said, a line he used thousands of times afterwards.
In Atlanta, the next time the two coaches met, Holtz had just enough Buckeys and plenty of Stallions.
The inaugural postseason meeting between NC State and West Virginia had an unlikely hero: scrawny 155-pound freshman quarterback Dave Buckey, who was pushed into his first career start when all-ACC quarterback Bruce Shaw suffered a broken wrist during a pre-bowl scrimmage.
The Mountains took an early 13-7 lead, with the Wolfpack’s lone score coming when Dave Buckey hit his twin brother Don on a 37-yard touchdown pass. The Wolfpack owned just a one-point lead at the half, thanks to a 1-yard run by fullback Stan Fritts.
No one in Atlanta Stadium, though, was confident State’s rookie signal-caller could lead his team to victory.
It didn’t take long into the third quarter to find that out. The Wolfpack scored four offensive touchdowns and one on defense en route to 35 unanswered points. Buckey kept handing the ball off to his backfield of so-called “Stallions” — Willie Burden, Fritts, Charley Young and Roland Hooks.
Fritts scored twice more on short runs, Dave Buckey hit Pat Hovance with a touchdown pass, Don Buckey scored on a 2-yard run and Burden, the 1973 ACC Player of the Year, finished out the day with the only postseason touchdown of his career.
The Buckeys-led offense rolled up a remarkable 535 yards, the most ever in a Wolfpack postseason game until Philip Rivers and Jerricho Cotchery came along in the 2003 Tangerine Bowl.
Bowden went back to Morgantown, West Virginia, with his head hung low. He had to issue a public apology for the way his team played and behaved in Atlanta just a few days after it returned.
“This might sound crazy,” Bowden said in his statement, “but I’m glad West Virginians are mad at the way we performed in the Peach Bowl. For 14,000 people to drive 300 miles or more and be humiliated would infuriate anyone.
“I do wish our fans could accept the cold, flat fact that we got our tails whipped by an excellent opponent and not try to go around and find behind-the-scenes reasons why we lost.
“I can assure you my preparations and the squad restrictions were the same as the other bowl participants. I can assure you long hair, mustaches, dress apparel or training rules in Atlanta didn’t lose the game for us.”
Hey, it was the 1970s…
Bowden’s relationship with the good folks of West Virginia was never really strong. The Southern Baptist football evangelist never really fit in just eight miles south of the Pennsylvania line, and Florida State approached him about vacant coaching opportunities after three of his five seasons with the Mountaineers.
Then, in 1975, the Peach Bowl invited both NC State and West Virginia back to Atlanta for a rematch of the 1972 game. It was expected to be a high-scoring, shoot-out game.
Late December has always been Georgia’s monsoon season, and the Peach Bowl was doused with its annual rainstorm, which slowed down the running of NC State standout freshman Ted Brown and the offensive attack led by seniors Dave and Don Buckey.
The game was fairly disastrous for the distracted Wolfpack. Rumors circulated in Raleigh that Holtz, who never saw a pasture that wasn’t greener than the one he was standing in, was a candidate to be the head coach of the NFL’s New Orleans Saints. Brown was suffering from a deep thigh bruise. And five plays into the game, standout defensive lineman Tom Higgins left the game with an ankle injury.
Brown shook off his pain, with runs of 26 and 54 yards in the first half. But the stadium suffered a key loss in the second quarter, when the clock began to malfunction, forcing the officials to keep time on their pocket watches on the field.
Officials had to tell Holtz and Bowden how much time remained at the beginning of every possession.
With the Pack on the 26-yard line after Brown’s long run, there were about two minutes remaining in the half. State made it to the 6-yard-line, but a rushed throw on third-and-3 forced Holtz to send his field goal unit onto the field – with 53 seconds left in the line judge’s pocket.
Jay Sherrill kicked a 21-yard field goal to give State a 10-0 lead, but West Virginia took the ball straight down the field to score on a 39-yard touchdown pass with four seconds remaining.
The Wolfpack offense was shut out in the second half, and West Virginia took a 13-10 lead in the fourth quarter on a touchdown pass that was tipped by two Wolfpack defenders.
When the game ended, West Virginia players and fans carried Bowden off the field on their shoulders, finally giving him the affection and respect he had longed for at the school.
Two weeks later, he was named the head coach at Florida State.
Holtz also left his position following the game, becoming head coach of the New York Jets instead of the Saints. He lasted just 13 games in the NFL before resigning with one game left on the regular-season schedule.
The coaches and their schools were not done with each other. At Notre Dame in 1988, Holtz defeated West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl to claim the only national championship of his career. In 1993, Holtz’s Fighting Irish beat Bowden’s Seminoles in the regular-season, but third-ranked FSU won the school’s first football national title by beating second-ranked Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. The team not picked to play in that pre-college football playoffs?
Undefeated West Virginia.
The third postseason meeting between NC State and West Virginia was between second-year Wolfpack coach Tom O’Brien and third-year Mountaineer coach Bill Stewart, but the drama was on WVU’s side of the field.
West Virginia had hired Dana Holgorsen as its “coach-in-waiting” in December, and Stewart was going to coach out one more year before giving way.
The 9-3 Mountaineers were favored over the 8-4 Wolfpack, but junior quarterback Russell Wilson threw a pair of touchdown passes and placekicker Josh Czajkowski booted field goals of 45, 38 and 40 yards in the 23-7 NC State victory.
Stewart resigned as head coach the following summer.
Saturday’s game will feature a grizzled veteran — Dave Doeren, now in his seventh season with the Wolfpack — against newcomer Neal Brown, the former Troy coach who went to Morgantown after Holgorsen left for Houston following eight years at West Virginia.
Doeren’s Wolfpack defeated Brown’s Trojans 49-21 in the 2015 season opener for both teams at Carter-Finley Stadium and Brown’s first-ever game as a head coach.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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