A Football Sprinter, Like Ted Brown Used to Be

Many a defender fell flat on his face trying to catch Ted Brown.

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

Ted Brown never won an Atlantic Coast Conference championship as a member of NC State’s football team, but it's a little remembered part of history that the league’s all-time leading rusher did help the Wolfpack win the first 4x100-meter relay at the 1978 track and field championships.

Like current Wolfpack leading rusher Nyheim Hines, a junior who has helped win back-to-back 4x100-meter titles at the ACC meet and is now the football team's top rushing threat, Brown used his natural speed in both sports, though he's mostly remembered for holding the ACC career rushing record of 4,602 yards ever since his career ended in 1978.

In fact, the NC State track program has greatly benefited from having football players on its roster, and the football program has benefited from borrowing track recruits. Both Danny Peebles and Alvis Whitted were originally recruited for track, but ended up playing professional football in the NFL.

Since that first race in ’78, NC State has won a total of 12 titles in the 4x100, the second most of any ACC school. Of those titles, 10 had at least one football player in the lineup, including the two most recent with Hines.

Peebles, of course, helped win four ACC titles and one NCAA title during his career from 1985-88. His son Dylan, a freshman, ran the anchor leg of last year’s title race with Hines.

For Brown, running track at State was just a natural extension of his track career at High Point’s Andrews High School. Frankly, he doesn’t remember how long he ran track at State and the records from those years are pretty spotty.

In 1978, following a record-setting junior year in which he rushed for 1,251 yards and 14 touchdowns, Brown helped the Wolfpack track team set the stage for breaking Maryland’s strangle-hold on the ACC title. The Terps won their 23^rd consecutive conference crown that year, but not without being pushed by coach Jim Wescott’s Wolfpack.

By 1982, with the help of a couple key football players and new head coach Tom Jones, the Wolfpack started a championship streak of its own, winning seven consecutive men’s outdoor track championships.

Brown says he never participated in a spring football practice. In fact, head coach Bo Rein, who took over for Lou Holtz after Brown’s freshman year, never had a spring game. He cancelled the scheduled 1976 Red and White Game the day before it was supposed to be played at Carter Stadium and had only spring-ending scrimmages after that.

So Brown wasn’t necessarily needed. Besides, he says, track did him more good than football during the off-season.

“I ran track to help my speed and to be in better shape,” Brown says. “In track, we ran every day, in bad weather, no matter what we had going on. In football, we would lift weights one day and run gassers the next and not always focus on sprinting.

“I always felt like I was in better shape coming into the fall after I ran track in the spring.”

Brown was fortunate to be on the same team as a world-class sprinter who helped the Wolfpack win that inaugural 4x100 title.

His name was Albert Lomotey, a native of Ghana who had qualified to be on his country’s 1976 Olympic team. He never competed in the Montreal Games, however, because of the 1976 African boycott.

Instead, the diminutive Lomotey—who stood all of 5-feet, 4-inches—enrolled at Pembroke State in the fall of 1976, but transferred to NC State in the winter of 1977 because his country gave him a scholarship to study agricultural science. He was not eligible to run in 1977, joined the track team for a spectacular 1978 season. (He left school after that to return to Africa, and neither he nor Brown ran track in 1979.)

With Brown leading the way, the Wolfpack’s relay team won the 440-yard relay at the fifth-annual Atlantic Coast Relays hosted by NC State at the Paul Derr Track. They were at their peak that April when they went to Clemson for the ACC Championship meet, where all anyone wanted to talk about was Maryland freshman sensation Renaldo Nehemiah, who had set a world indoor record in the 110-meter high hurdles before he enrolled in college.

The 6-feet, 1-inch Nehemiah out-leaned Lomotey to win the 100-meter dash by .01 seconds, but the heralded freshman slipped out of the blocks in the 200 meters and Lomotey won the race in an ACC-record 21.09 seconds. Nehemiah also finished second in both hurdles races.

Brown liked being on the track because of his relative anonymity. He had just completed his second 1,000-yard season with the Wolfpack and was already being hyped as a Heisman candidate for his senior campaign that fall.

“Running track, I was incognito and under the radar,” Brown says.

He was also a huge asset in getting the Wolfpack sprinters off to a good start.

“The reason they wanted me in the leadoff position was I had a very quick first step and the ability to get out fast,” Brown says. “The main goal was for us to be in position to get to Lomotey. If we got him the baton with the lead or only one or two steps to make up, it was over.”

Kind of like when Touchdown Ted, who still owns the ACC record for career rushing touchdowns and scoring, had the ball in his hands and the end zone in his sights.

NC State’s 4x100-meter ACC champions
Year	Time	Team
1978	40.44	Ted Brown, Calvin Lanier, Darryl Patterson, Albert Lomotey
1980	40.18	Marcus Smith, Ed McIntyre, Brian Burns, Ron Foreman
1981	40.65	Auguston Young, Ed McIntyre, Greg Smith, Marcus Smith
1983	39.93	Perry Williams, Dee Dee Hoggard, Alston Glenn, Harvey McSwain
1985	39.17	Auguston Young, Alston Glenn, Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain*
1986	39.59	Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
1987	39.90	Malcolm Branham, Dwight Frazier, Darian Bryant, Danny Peebles
1988	40.23	Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
1989	40.00	Darian Bryant, Kevin Braunskill, Michael Brooks, Dwight Frazier
1996	39.92	Butch McClelland, Neil Chance, Lloyd Harrison, Alvis Whitted
2016	39.42	Quashawn Cunningham, Shannon Patterson, Nyheim Hines, Jonathan Addison
2017	39.17	Nyheim Hines, Cravont Charleston, Junpai Dowdy, Dylan Peebles
Football players in bold
*NCAA Champion