NC State and UNC football share a similar struggle. Could today’s game be different?
In the world of college football, the state of North Carolina is an outlier. It is the ninth-most populous state, according to the most recent census, and the only one among the top 10 without a school that has won a national championship (though, yes, the last of Illinois’ five claimed championships came 70 years ago).
Limit it to recent history, and North Carolina’s lack of high-level college football success becomes more glaring. Schools in all four bordering states have played for or won national championships during the past 25 years: Tennessee in 1998, Virginia Tech in 1999, Georgia in 2018 and Clemson, often throughout the past several years.
And here, well — N.C. State won 11 games and dominated Notre Dame in the Gator Bowl once, almost 20 years ago. And North Carolina won 11 games and the ACC’s Coastal Division in 2015, only to lose the conference championship game and set records for defensive futility in a bowl game defeat against Baylor.
Carolina and State meet again Friday night in Raleigh for the latest edition of what has long been the state’s premier college football rivalry. For once, it’s a game with some significance beyond the mere fact that the teams are playing each other — the Wolfpack still has a chance to win the Atlantic Division, after all. Yet broadly speaking, it’d be difficult to find a more intense rivalry, between schools so close together, more defined by shared mediocrity and mutual disappointment.
If the UNC-Duke rivalry represents the best of North Carolina’s proud college basketball history, then the State-UNC football rivalry personifies the state’s inability to ascend the hump, at the highest level, in that sport. It’s not for lack of effort. Both schools have committed and committed again to building new football facilities over the past 20 years. Both schools have chased under-performing coaches out of town. Both schools have sent plenty of players to the NFL.
And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“To be able to sustain success, one school is going to have to dominate the state in recruiting for a period of time,” Larry Fedora, the former UNC head coach, said by phone earlier this week. His relative lack of in-state recruiting success was part of the reason UNC fired him in 2018, after his teams won five games over his final two seasons.
For a while under Fedora, it looked like the Tar Heels had turned a corner. There was the 11-3 season in 2015, followed by a 7-2 start the next. Then came the collapse, one that included a 2016 defeat against the Wolfpack that turned the rivalry in State’s favor, if only briefly. Could it be possible for both the Wolfpack and Tar Heels to ascend to a higher level at the same time?
Fedora considered the possibility of something that has rarely happened.
“I think that would be very difficult to do in a state that size,” he said, “with the amount of elite players that are coming out of that state. So you’re going to have to recruit a high level out of state also to be able to do that. You have a better chance of one school doing it than two.”
Mack Brown is recruiting no shortage of talent to UNC in his second tenure in Chapel Hill. Many of those players are young, and some have yet to arrive on campus. But as Brown learned toward the end of his time at Texas, it’s one thing to recruit at a high level and another to develop that talent. After starting the season with such grand aspirations, and with the majority of starters back from that Orange Bowl team, it’s fair to question what’s going on with UNC’s player development.
State, meanwhile, had a chance earlier this month to seize control of its division only to surrender it in a sloppy, narrow defeat at Wake Forest. That loss served as another reminder that the Wolfpack can never seem to take that next step — a dynamic with which UNC can identify.
Indeed, the Tar Heels and Wolfpack are arguably the closest things to the college football equivalent of that Spider-Man meme, with the two Spider-Mans (Spider-Men, as it were?) pointing at each other as if to say: “Are you me? Am I you? Are we the same?”
In the case of State-UNC football, the answers are: Yes. And yes. And, um, yes.
Both schools would disagree, and so might the majority of their fans, though that’s part of the fun. Because for all the talk about opposing cultures and brands — the stuff about “hand in the dirt” (N.C. State) and “flagship” (UNC) and “blue collar” (N.C. State) and “sleeping giant” (UNC) — these football programs have pretty much been the same for decades.
They may take different roads, but they often wind up in the same place.
UNC fans might say: the Tar Heels own the series! Look at the all-time head-to-head, where UNC is 68-36-6. A commanding record that turns less commanding when one realizes the Tar Heels were at their most dominant in this series before and during the Model T era.
And N.C. State fans might say: the Wolfpack has more than held its own in modern times. A 12-9 record against UNC this century and the track record of great quarterbacks — Philip Rivers and Russell Wilson, primarily — who’ve gone onto Hall of Fame caliber careers in the NFL. And that’s true, too, though it only underscores that State hasn’t done a lot with superior talent at the most important position.
Fans of both schools can twist the data to fit whatever argument they’d like to make. But, since the ACC’s founding in 1953, the records are strikingly similar. During that span, UNC has finished ranked among the top 25 12 times, while N.C. State has accomplished that 11 times. Both schools have been to exactly 32 bowl games since the ACC’s founding. State last won the conference in 1979; UNC last won it in 1980. UNC holds the head-to-head lead, though the six-game edge since 1953 pales in comparison to the cushion it built in more primitive sporting times.
The Spider-Man memeing of these programs has been at play for years. But their metamorphosis into mirror-image, homogeneous organisms became complete this season, and arguably happened the very first week. That’s when UNC, then ranked among the top 10, arrived in Blacksburg for what was supposed to be a national coming out party, of sorts, for Sam Howell and his Heisman Trophy campaign. Instead? Well, you remember.
It brought to mind the question of when the last time such a thing had happened around here. When’s the last time an area team entered a season with lofty dreams and the best quarterback in school history, only to fall flat in an early-season defeat, on the road, against a conference opponent?
It was a while ago, but not that long ago. The answer: 2003, when N.C. State, led by Rivers, went on the road against Wake Forest and returned home with a loss that took all the air out of a season that’d started with immense hype and promise. The Wolfpack, without much of a defense, was left to try to outscore everyone and sometimes did and sometimes didn’t while hovering around .500 on the way to a forgettable bowl game.
Sound familiar, UNC?
Looking back, there’s still a sense that State wasted the Rivers years, the way that UNC hasn’t made the most of Howell’s time in Chapel Hill. Yes, Rivers led his team to 11 victories and the Gator Bowl triumph against Notre Dame. And, yes, Howell led the Tar Heels to an Orange Bowl appearance just last season. But generational talent at quarterback doesn’t come around often (or, if it does at N.C. State, with Wilson, it’s largely squandered again).
But there’s an argument to be made that the relative mediocrity UNC and State share in football makes their rivalry that much better. So often, this one game is the most important thing either team has to play for. It’s often the difference between finishing around .500 and spending the off-season taking abuse from your friends and relatives who went to the other school, and finishing around .500 and being able to dispense that abuse (playfully and with taste and tact, of course).
Some rivalries are built on mutual greatness and a tradition of excellence. Take UNC-Duke basketball, for instance. There, one of them can get swept in the regular season only to win the ACC tournament or advance to the Final Four. There are more opportunities for success. The conference and national championships (and those schools have won a lot of those) override whatever happened in February or early March between them.
Not so in football between State and UNC. Friday is UNC’s bowl game, regardless of where it winds up in about a month or so. As for the Wolfpack, there are real stakes this year with the Atlantic Division still in play.
The result Friday night won’t matter if Wake Forest wins at Boston College on Saturday. But, for State, there’d be nothing worse — literally nothing, in the realm of normal football happenings (and not, say, in the realm of an Earthly chasm opening and swallowing Carter-Finley Stadium, which would be worse) — than losing to UNC and giving away its chance at the division. Which means, probably, that the chances are greater that it happens that way.
At this point, it’s almost become destiny, something fated. The State-UNC football rivalry doesn’t lack for mutual disdain. One of the worst parts of the rivalry, for both, is that they can’t seem to get away from each other. For the rest of us, it’s pretty fun to watch.
This story was originally published November 26, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "NC State and UNC football share a similar struggle. Could today’s game be different?."
