Political Pliability and Wooden Goal Posts

 

Political Pliability and Wooden Goal Posts

Goal posts at Kenan Stadium coming down (photo: 1959 Agromeck).

BY TIM PEELER, © 2025

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In a stunning flip-flop by one of North Carolina’s most astute political minds of the 20^th century, Jim Hunt changed his mind.

Immediately after his school, NC State, beat North Carolina 7-0 to open the 1957 football season for both teams, students from the Raleigh institution rushed the field at Carolina’s Kenan Stadium to begin the process of tearing down the goal posts in the south end zone. Tar Heel fans defended their turf and the local police got involved, accusing State students of brandishing glass bottles as they poured onto the field. Three fans were arrested for disorderly conduct.

It was called “a near riot” in the local newspapers, though that same description was not used two months later when Carolina fans tore down the goal posts at Duke Stadium after beating the Blue Devils.

The Monday following the Wolfpack-Tar Heel contest, State chancellor Carey Bostian and UNC chancellor Clyde Aycock met with the student body presidents of both schools — Hunt and UNC-CH’s Sonny Evans — to come up with some sort of solution so that such things would never happen again.

Their idea was a collegial postgame ceremony after all future games between the schools in which a representative of the losing team would hand over the goal posts to the winning team, with everyone else staying in the stands.

That never happened.

Hunt and Bostian did not like the way State students were portrayed for beating the Tar Heels in the ’57 game, calling newspaper accounts “highly exaggerated.”

“For example,” Hunt and Bostian said in a joint statement, “numerous eyewitnesses have said they did not see any students with bottles.”

Aycock and Evans were all for giving the goal posts away, rather than letting the agriculturalists loose on an open field: “We feel that the action of the police in trying to control the crowds around the goal posts were taken not in order to protect the $15 worth of goal-post structure but with a view to preserving law and order and to prevent a scuffle from becoming something worse.”

Newspapers were more succinct.

“Officials of North Carolina State College and the University of North Carolina decided today it’s best to give away a set of goal posts rather than have heads cracked in post-football game ruckuses,” reported the Durham Herald.

By the next fall, as the two teams again prepared to play their season-opener in Chapel Hill, Hunt kicked off a rare second term as State’s president by leading the effort to back out of the agreement. In a front-page plea in Technician, NC State’s student newspaper, Hunt wrote an open letter to his fellow students explaining his decision.

Jim and Carolyn Hunt at his 1984 inaugural ball at Reynolds Coliseum.

“The idea of ‘presenting the goalpost’ is a fine one in theory—in practice it is unworkable,” said Hunt, who went on to become North Carolina’s only four-term governor and an advisor to politicians throughout his time in office, focused specifically on education. “No such policy will be followed at the Carolina game on Saturday. This was decided after correspondence between the president of the student body at Carolina and myself during the past summer. At a conference in Chapel Hill last Friday, it was confirmed.”

There were some concessions made between the two schools in order to get the agreement changed.

First, the Chapel Hill police agreed not to get in the way of students and fans as they rushed the field.

Second, losing fans were asked to stay in the stands.

Third, and most incredible of all, the UNC athletics facilities staff agreed to replace the standard steel goal posts with a specially designed wooden frame, decorated with paper streamers, that could be more easily taken down after the game, splinters and all. The “safe, sane and realistic policy” was supposed to be in the name of removing risk to the winning team. Read all the details here.

And so it happened, after Wolfpack coach Earle Edwards and his team beat the Tar Heels in 1958 for the third year in a row, State fans were unobstructed as they tore down the goal posts yet again at a stadium that was often their home-away-from home in the rivalry. The two teams alternated being the home team as the teams played 18 out of 20 games in Chapel Hill from 1943 until 1966 because Kenan Stadium was almost twice as large as State’s Riddick Stadium. (The two rivals have alternated between Raleigh and Chapel Hill since Carter-Finley Stadium opened in 1966 and will play for the 115th time on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.)

In the early days of the Atlantic Coast Conference, unlike the league’s strict guidelines today that fine athletic departments for simply rushing the field, tearing down goal posts was common during rivalry games. (State paid $50,000 to the league after students rushed onto the field earlier this year after a win over No. 8 Georgia Tech on Nov. 1, which violated the league’s new “event security policy.”)

In 1958, however, three opposing teams tore down Carolina’s goal posts: NC State did so in the season-opener at Kenan Stadium after a 21-14 victory, Notre Dame did so on its home field in South Bend, Indiana, following the final home game in a 6-4 season; and Duke did so in the annual season-ending game between the Blue Devils and Tar Heels, 7-6, with 10 seconds still left on the scoreboard.

The wooden posts were eventually replaced by H-shaped aluminum posts in the 1960s and the unilever single posts made with a steel base and aluminum crossbars in the 1970s.

Storming the field was still relatively common until the 21st century. Wolfpack fans first tore down the goal posts in 1941 after beating UNC-CH in Kenan Stadium. After beating Florida State 3-0 in 1966, students tore down the goal posts and the school tore down the stadium following the final game ever played at Riddick. They did so as recently as 1998 after beating No. 2 Florida State and in 2000 Georgia Tech, but anything similar in Saturday’s game will escalate the fine.

To celebrate, this year's winning players will have to limit themselves to dancing on logos or planting their flags on the field, both of which have spiced up this particular rivalry in recent years.