A Victory for the Accused

Photo courtesy of NC State athletics.

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

No one likes to be called a cheater, especially former NC State coach Chuck Amato.

Or Philip Rivers, Jerricho Cotchery or Dantonio Burnette.

They all took it a little personally, then, when Notre Dame coach Tyrone Willingham and his staff accused the the Wolfpack of just that in the days leading up to the 2003 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.

And it’s one of the primary, if little remembered, reasons that Amato’s team wanted so badly to smash the Fighting Irish in that New Year’s Day game at Alltel Stadium.

The rhetoric started before the teams ever arrived in Jacksonville when Willingham and defensive coordinator Kent Baer both questioned the legality of a Wolfpack formation in which four players ran off the field after the offense broke the huddle and four substitutes ran on before the ball was snapped.

They even began lobbying, from afar, the Conference USA crew that was scheduled to officiate the game.

ACC coordinator of officials Tommy Hunt seemingly put the matter to rest with authority, saying as long as the new players were in position for at least three seconds before the snap. It had not been an issue for any team during the regular season, in which the Wolfpack won its first nine games, lost three in a row, then beat Florida State in its finale to earn a surprising bid to the Gator Bowl for its first ever meeting with the Irish.

“There is nothing wrong with what they do,” Hunt said before the game.

Twice during the regular season the Wolfpack had been flagged for illegal substitution and both times the penalty was waved off.

But Willingham, who had coached at NC State for three seasons in the early 1980s, pushed the issue to Defcon 1 with some of his pre-arrival words in which he questioned not only the legality, but also the sportsmanship of the move.

“I think I’m concerned about it in terms of the legality of it and how it affects the overall flow and the sportsmanship and especially our function as a defensive team,” he said. “Is that not permitted in the rules? Then it should be prohibited. If it is, then the defense should be allowed equal opportunity to get their people on, so we can match up.

“I would imagine that the Conference USA officials will get films from both our teams and if they see things that are outside the rules, they will make decisions on them. I’m not contending any point of view. I’m just saying if the officials look at this particular patter of substitution and they view it not within the structure of the rules or sportsmanship, that they will make a decision.”

Amato, of course, didn’t take the veiled pressure on the officials lightly and he went on his own offensive.

“Well good, we'll tell the officials to look at the Purdue game and watch [Notre Dame] beat the crap out of the center on extra points and field goals,'' Amato said.

Notre Dame was penalized for that against the Boilermakers.

It made for some interesting pregame chatter for two teams that had little in common other than Willingham’s brief stint as an assistant under Tom Reed with the Wolfpack and a shared relationship with former head coach Lou Holtz.

The Irish came into the game as college football’s most storied program, while the Wolfpack and its brash coach yearned for national prestige and acceptance.

Throughout that week, the Irish coaching staff was chafing like a sweaty golfer walking 36 holes on a hot day. They had to deal with a slew of injuries that cost them two offensive linemen and a starting linebacker in their season finale. And they had they distraction shortly after arriving of dealing with senior safety Chad DeBolt was arrested for trespassing after “rowdy and rambunctious” behavior at a Jacksonville Beach nightclub. His bloody mug shot, with both eyes swollen shut and visible marks on his face, was plastered on the front of the local sports page.

Willingham, quite forcefully, refused to talk about the incident and would not discuss DeBolt status for the game.

“Let's make sure we all start on the same page: There will be no reference to Chad DeBolt,” Willingham told a gaggle of reporters at practice after the incident. “Just so you know. All right, let's start.''

Amato and his team, huge underdogs against the No. 11 Irish, were loose throughout for several reasons, one of which was the inclusion of a five recruits who joined the team for the bowl trip, including future All-America defensive end Mario Williams.

Williams, linebacker Ernest Jones and offensive lineman Yomi Ojo had just finished their high school careers and were planning to enroll at NC State when its winter break was over 10 days after the bowl game. The early enrollment was something Rivers popularized three years earlier, but going to the bowl game was a new wrinkle Amato added just for this game. Two remnants from the previous recruiting class, Garland Heath and LaMart Barrett, also joined the team in Jacksonville, as tight end Sean Berton, a transfer from West Virginia, had done the previous year at the Tangerine Bowl.

They all participated in practices, attended team activities and received the same copious amounts of bowl-branded loot that included a watch, a travel bag, a travel alarm clock and various pieces of logoed apparel. They also got championship rings after the game.

It was all perfectly legal, of course, something that Amato had thought about doing at Florida State, but never really found many takers in graduating high school and enrolling early in college. Rivers changed all that, and others followed.

It was a perk that helped Williams—one of the most highly recruited defensive players in the nation—chose NC State over Ohio State, Tennessee and Clemson, all of whom quickly offered up an invitation to join them at their bowl games after they heard Williams’ plan to go to Jacksonville.

“Well, why didn’t they think of it first?” said the former coach.

The acrimony of the week spilled over into the game. In the first quarter, with the Irish seemingly headed for a touchdown, NC State linebacker Dantonio Burnette knocked Fighting Irish quarterback Carlyle Holliday out of the game with a separated shoulder. The Irish had to settle for a field goal and a 3-0 lead. Carlyle’s replacement, Pat Dillingham, threw three interceptions, all to Wolfpack safety Rod Johnson, while the Wolfpack had no turnovers.

Photo courtesy of NC State athletics.

The Wolfpack scored three touchdowns in the second quarter, two rushing by freshman T.A. McLendon and a 9-yard pass from Rivers to Cotchery. The first of those drives covered 96 hard-fought yards to give NC State a lead it never gave up. Notre Dame added another field goal after a goal-line stand, but the Wolfpack answered with a touchdown on a 7-yard pass from Rivers to All-ACC tight end Sean Berton.

Notre Dame, hampered by the loss of DeBolt, two suspended linemen and one injured linebacker, committed five personal fouls in the game, as the teams combined for 19 total penalties.

One of those penalties was late in the game, when Amato ran onto the field to argue that Notre Dame broken its huddle with 12 players, an infraction that wasn’t called. It was exactly the violation Willingham and his staff had accused the Wolfpack of earlier in the week.

The penalty gave Notre Dame a first-and-goal on the NC State 1-yard line. Amato put his first-team defense back on the field. It stuffed the Irish on four consecutive plays with less than a minute to play and prevented them from entering the painted end zone, as it had done all day long.

The final score, 28-6, didn’t seem to indicate just how much the Wolfpack dominated the game.

 “I didn't expect to win this game so easily,” Berton said afterwards. “I thought they would play hard. But it was an easy win. You saw it.

“We expected to win, but we didn't expect it to be this easy.”

For a while, the victory gave the Wolfpack the national respect Amato and his players craved. Rivers was on the front page of USA Today the next day. The team finished No. 12 in the final Associated Press poll, the second highest finish in school history. Sports Illustrated ranked them in their preliminary Top 10 for the 2003 season.

“It was a day we wanted to make one last statement,” said Burnette, who is now the Wolfpack’s strength and conditioning coach and its designated chief motivator for games against Notre Dame. “It seemed like we were the ‘other team’ here all week. It was Notre Dame this, Notre Dame that.

“We thought we had something to prove, not just against [the Irish] but to the nation. People have said we were a fraud, that we didn’t play anybody, that we were a flukey team, even though we knew we were a good team.

“What do they say now? We just smacked Notre Dame around. What do they say now?”

One thing they couldn’t say was that the Wolfpack cheated their way to the victory.