Late Into the Foggy Night

Florida's defense held NC State senior Anthony Barbour to a season-low 50 yards in the 1992 Gator Bowl.

© Tim Peeler, 2018

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The dense fog that rolled in off the St. Johns River on New Year’s Eve 1992 was not exactly biblical. It didn’t come in low to the ground.

So maybe it’s a stretch to say that every first-born son in the crowd of 71,233 at Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl Stadium was scared on that Thursday night, but not one of them would have been surprised if Charlton Heston or the late Yul Brynner showed up for halftime entertainment.

All day long, a winter low-pressure front covered the city of Jacksonville in a dull gray mist. When the game between NC State and Florida began that evening, visibility was fine, though neither of the high-scoring teams could find the end zone in the scoreless first quarter.

By the second quarter, neither team could see the end zone, as the odorless miasma settled in over the top of the stadium.

“It was real foggy,” says Anthony Barbour, the Wolfpack’s leading rusher that season and now the head coach at Durham’s Jordan High School. “It affected everything we wanted to do in the game.”

How foggy was it?

“By the second half, we couldn’t see the fans at all from the field,” Barbour says.

Likewise, few in the stadium that night saw what happened after halftime. NC State’s assistant coaches left the press box at halftime and never returned, making all play calls from the sidelines the rest of the night.

The commentary of the TBS crew of Gary Bender and Pat Haden should have come with a “inspired by real events” message, because their account of what happened was as fictionalized as the ticker-reading radio broadcaster calling road games in “Bull Durham.”

When a smoke bomb was thrown from the stands onto the field late in the game, Haden said “I couldn’t tell.”

The low visibility gave press box wags, unencumbered by seeing actual plays of the game, the opportunity to wax poetic in their next morning editions.

“A thick fog tumbled over the north stands and began filling the stadium in the first quarter,” wrote Orlando Sentinel columnist Larry Guest. “From the press box, the players on the field soon became hazy wisps, and the far side of the stadium was a rumor.”

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Dick Sheridan’s No. 12 Wolfpack, looking to become the first team in school history to reach double-digit victories and finish in the top 10 of the final polls, were favored going into the game against the No. 14 Gators. It had a staunch defense, a high-scoring offense led by low-rumbling Barbour and a coach that was 2-1 against third-year Florida coach Steve Spurrier, back in the days when the two neighbors played regularly.

Sheridan’s Wolfpack had beaten Spurrier-coached Duke two out of three years in the latter's ACC days.

On this night, however, not even the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse would’ve helped the Wolfpack against the home-standing Gators.

Spurrier’s team came out for the game dressed in all-blue uniforms, looking more like a slow-pitch softball team than a Southeastern Conference power. However, the Gator defense, for the first time all season, played like it had an additional hitter, holding the Wolfpack scoreless in the first half for the first time all season.

Barbour entered the game as the ACC’s top rusher, with 1,204 yards in the regular season. He managed a season-low 50 yards on the ground against a Gator defense that had been ranked ninth in the SEC.

Meanwhile, a Gator offense that had relied all season long on the arm of senior quarterback Shane Matthews turned to a different source of power: junior tailback Erict Rhett.

Rhett had led the SEC in rushing the year before, but had been hampered all season by a sore ankle and inexperienced offensive line. He rushed for a career-low 3.6 yards per carry and a total of 903 yards on the ground, more than 200 yards fewer than the year before.

That night in Jacksonville, however, Rhett rolled in silently like the fog and slipped through the Wolfpack defense throughout the game.

The Galloping Ghost carried the ball 39 times and gained 182 yards, which is still the second most ever given up by the Wolfpack to an opposing player in a bowl game. He caught a team-high seven passes for another 60 yards. He was the obvious choice as the game’s Most Valuable Player.

"I've never carried the ball that many times in my career," an exhausted Rhett said after the game. "I felt it, too."

Meanwhile, the Wolfpack scored twice in the second half, thanks both times to Florida turnovers, though its lone touchdown (an 11-yard pass from Terry Jordan to Aubrey Shaw) in the 27-10 defeat affected the betting line, but not the game’s outcome.

State finished the year 9-3-1 and ranked No. 15 in the final coaches’ poll and No. 17 in the final Associated Press poll. It wasn’t until nine years later that the Pack finally got its first 10-win season, when Chuck Amato’s team beat Notre Dame in the Gator Bowl to finish 11-3 on the year.

One last thing disappeared into the fog that night: Dick Sheridan, though no one would know for another six months that it was his last game with the Wolfpack.

Sheridan waited through spring practice and most of the off-season before announcing his retirement for health reasons on June 30, barely a month before his team began preparing for the 1993 season.