In a perfect world in which the college football season goes off on time, Wednesday, June 17 marks 78 days until NC State’s season and ACC opener against Louisville, a Thursday night road game that will likely be nationally televised.

Each day, The Wolfpacker will do a countdown to the season with a reflection on the significance of that number to NC State.

In NC State's history, it has finished in the top 25 of the final Associated Press poll on 12 occasions. The highest ever was in 1974, when Lou Holtz's squad was 11th.

To be fair, the famous 1967 squad that went 9-2 and reached as high as No. 3 in the AP poll before a close 13-8 loss at No. 8 Penn State probably could have competed with the 1974 team had the AP poll extended beyond 10 teams then.

Nevertheless, the 1970s were a bit of a golden era for NC State football. Five times in the decade NC State finished ranked in the top 20, including in 1978 in the third of four years for Bo Rein as head coach.

The 1978 squad started 4-0 before losing a top-20 showdown at Maryland. After trouncing archrival UNC 34-7 in response to its first loss, NC State lost a home contest with Clemson. NC State bounced back with a win at home over South Carolina and then faced No. 2 Penn State on the road.

The Nittany Lions were undefeated in nine contests, with seven wins by at least 16 points. NC State though gave Penn State a battle before losing 19-10. Penn State would lose 14-7 to Alabama in the national title game.

After an 8-3 regular season, the Pack played No. 16 Pittsburgh in the Tangerine Bowl and won 30-17. That victory catapulted NC State to No. 18 in the final AP poll.

That Wolfpack team was led by a pretty simple strategy on offense: hand the ball off, often, to Ted Brown and run him, presumably behind center Jim Ritcher, often. For the first and only time in school history, two members of NC State were named consensus first-team All-American in the same year: Brown and Ritcher.

Brown ran for a school-record 302 times for an also school-record 1,350 yards, totals that do not include the bowl game (Brown ran 28 times for 126 yards and a score vs. Pitt). He had two of NC State's top 15 running performances ever that year: 198 yards vs. Syracuse and 189 against UNC. It completed Brown's career with a still ACC-record 4,602 rushing yards.

Ritcher had another year left, and in 1979 he would win the Outland Trophy as college football's best lineman.

Both Brown and Ritcher are in the College Football Hall of Fame.

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