What if Sheridan Had Come to NC State in 1982?

Former Furman coach Dick Sheridan compiled a 52-29-3 record as NC State's head coach from 1986-92) and went to six bowl games in seven seasons.

© Tim Peeler, 2017

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In the winter of 1982, when it was clear that Monte Kiffin was not going to last as NC State’s football coach despite his second winning season in three years, athletics director Willis Casey made a phone call to an up-and-coming coach down in Greenville, South Carolina.

Dick Sheridan had been the head coach at Furman for five years after five years as a Paladin assistant, and seemed quite similar to Casey to another young coach he once hired to lead the Wolfpack, Lou Holtz.

Casey had tried to hire other candidates during a whirlwind—and somewhat futile—three-week coaching search. Kiffin, hired three years before when Bo Rein left for LSU, had been a mostly successful coach, with a 16-17 overall record in Raleigh. However, he had been hired by NC State chancellor Joab Thomas, not athletics director Willis Casey, who had been “unavailable” to hire Rein’s replacement.

Kiffin had a good team in 1982, but all five of his team’s losses in the 6-5 season were against Top 20 teams. Then there was the matter of a recruiting turf battle over an in-state high school recruit with Clemson’s Danny Ford led to a visit from the NCAA and some self-imposed sanctions over what was essentially a minor recruiting violation, but the combination of losses, possible scandal and lack of support from Casey and the leaders of the Wolfpack Club was too much for Kiffin to remain.

The coach was let go 10 days after a 41-3 loss to Miami in the 1982 season finale.

Over the next three weeks, Casey had remarkably little success finding a replacement.

He tried to hire Tulsa head coach John Cooper, another promising young coach who later lead Ohio State to three Big Ten titles. But Cooper, who was both head football and athletics director at Tulsa, said no.

Casey then turned to Holy Cross coach Rick E. Carter, who had turned that small Division I-A school around after just two seasons. But the school would not give NC State permission to talk to Carter and made it known it would not release him from his five-year contract.

(Three years later, on Feb. 2, 1986, Carter was still the head coach of the Crusaders. However, he was depressed about the death of his father, the poor health of his mother, the lack of advancement in his profession and the school’s decision to de-emphasize football. He committed suicide by hanging himself at his home, sending shockwaves through the world of college football.)

After Casey was unable to get Carter in 1982, he turned 41-year-old Sheridan, who had just taken the Paladins to their first appearance I-AA playoffs. By all accounts, Sheridan was expected to be an excellent Division I-A head coach. Several bigger schools had already come calling.

South Carolina, Sheridan’s alma mater, was interested. But Sheridan had no use for the way athletics director Bob Marcum had treated head football coach Richard Bell, who was fired after just one season for refusing Marcum’s order to revamp his coaching staff.

Sheridan, who had a well-known stubborn streak long before he left Furman, made it clear he didn’t want to work under those circumstances.

“A coach is on the hot seat, not the athletic director,” Sheridan said at the time. “And I’m not willing to entrust these things to an athletic director. If South Carolina is looking for a coach that is willing to entrust critical decisions of the football program itself to the athletic director, then they are not looking for me.”

South Carolina hired Joe Morrison from New Mexico instead.

Duke also interviewed Sheridan to coach the Blue Devils after Red Wilson was fired following the 1982 season. When Sheridan said no, Duke athletics director Tom Butters hired Alabama-alum Steve Sloan from Mississippi State.

Casey was ready to offer the Wolfpack positon to Sheridan, his third attempt at replacing Kiffin. Sheridan also said no, but for reasons that had little to do with football.

Both Sheridan’s sons, Bobby and John, were enrolled at Travelers Rest High School and the coach wanted them to have the opportunity to graduate from there before he moved on.

“They had been in the same school district their whole academic careers and I didn’t want to move them,” Sheridan said this week. “It’s very unusual for a coach to have that situation for his family—I don’t know anybody who has ever done.

“It was important to me because they were both captains of the football team and presidents of the student body while they were there. If we had moved before they graduated, I don’t think that would have happened.”

So Sheridan elected to stay in Greenville.

That left Casey—who is rightly lauded for his ability to find young coaches like Holtz, Kay Yow, Richard Sykes, Bo Rein, Rollie Geiger, among others, for Wolfpack athletics—still searching for a replacement.

On Dec. 21, 1982, he turned to the cradle of coaches, Miami of Ohio, to hire 37-year-old Tom Reed as the Wolfpack’s next coach. Reed, however, was not of the same mold of former Miami coaches like Bo Schembechler, Ara Parseghian, Woody Hayes, Paul Brown and Weeb Ewbank, and he never really got over the title of “Dick Crum disciple.” Reed had been an assistant under the North Carolina head coach while Crum was the head coach Miami.

For the next three seasons, Reed posted 3-8 records. His program hit rock bottom on the fifth week of the 1985 season, when the Wolfpack lost 42-20 to Sheridan’s Furman team at Carter-Finley Stadium. It was the Wolfpack’s second consecutive loss to the Paladins and Furman’s fourth straight season of beating a larger NCAA Division I-A (now FBC series) opponent.

When Reed was fired following the 1985 season, Casey made sure he did not lose Sheridan the second time around. A week after the Paladins lost to Georgia Southern in one of the best I-AA championship games ever played, Sheridan resigned his positions as Furman's football coach and athletics director to be named NC State's head coach. [Read coverage of that surprising turn of events here in the archives of Technician.]

Sheridan  inherited a strong crop of talent that included first-team All-ACC quarterback Erik Kramer, wide receiver Haywood Jeffires, Nasrallah Worthen, kicker Mike Cofer, all of whom played in the NFL.

Over the next seven seasons, Sheridan took the Wolfpack to six bowl games. He posted a 52-29-3 record over seven years, until he announced just before the 1993 season that he was retiring, ostensibly for health reasons. However, in intervening years, Sheridan has confessed that NC State’s treatment of longtime friend, men’s basketball coach and athletics director Jim Valvano had as much to do with his decision to leave the school as his health issues.

Sheridan retired to Surfside Beach, South Carolina, and has been involved in commercial and residential real estate ever since.

He’s pondered the question of whether anything would have been different for NC State’s program if he had taken the head football position in the winter of ’82 instead of ’85 many times through the years. He remains adamant that he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

“I made that decision for personal reasons,” Sheridan says. “I don’t know how it would have turned out if I had come to NC State earlier. But I am proud that I was able to stay at Furman until the boys finished their high school careers.

“That was important to me, and important to them.”

The 76-year-old Sheridan hopes to attend Saturday’s noon game between his two former teams at Carter-Finley Stadium, especially since one of his former Furman players and NC State graduate assistants, Clay Hendrix, is now the head coach of the Paladins.

First, however, he has to take care of some minor damage to his home caused last week by Hurricane Irma.