Jack McDowall was posthumously elected into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1975. At a regular-season game against Florida, his family was invited to celebrate the award. Pictured here, left to right are Rudolph Pate, Vice Chancellor for
Foundations and Development; Dick Herbert, Executive Secretary of the
American Football Coaches Association; Mrs. Sally McDowall; Fred "Tubby"
Logan, Captain of the 1926 Football Team; and the McDowalls' daughter, Sally F. Blake. The Wolfpack beat the Gators, 8-7.
© Tim Peeler, 2026
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The only previous time NC State opened its home football season on a Friday night against Richmond, as it will this week at Carter-Finley Stadium, the Wolfpack found a star.
In fact, he became one of the biggest names in the history of the football program, plastered between the upper and lower decks in a stadium where he never played.
He was a kid from Florida who was deemed too small to play for the Gators. They wouldn’t even talk to him. One day, while McDowall loitered around the pool hall in his hometown of Newberry, Florida, a traveler from North Carolina stopped in as asked if he would be willing to move to the Old North State to play high school football.
McDowall had nothing else to do, so he said "sure." He moved into a boarding house in the Richmond County town of Rockingham and helped the local high school to a runner-up finish in the 1923 eastern state championship. He went back to Florida with the hopes of getting a favorable look from the Gators, but they weren’t interested.
In 1924, NC State freshman team coach Gus Tebell convinced McDowall to come to Raleigh, perhaps because Tebell watched McDowall, as a Rockingham High senior, throw a 25-yard touchdown pass in a 7-3 victory to beat the NC State freshmen the year before.
Tebell took over as head varsity coach in 1925 and the first game of his tenure was at old Riddick Field against Richmond’s Spiders, a team that State had beaten in all seven games of a rivalry that dated back to 1895.
Both teams were rather unknown going into the opener. Richmond had lost six starters that still had eligibility. State, with little history of success, was welcoming its eighth new coach in the span of 11 years.
The game was supposed to be played on Saturday, Sept. 26, but was moved up a day so it wouldn’t conflict with the North Carolina-Wake Forest game at Emerson Field in Chapel Hill.
McDowall earned a starting position from the outset and lined up at left halfback beside senior Johnny Jennette, voted "best looking man on campus" and known as a pretty good running back.
No one knew what to expect from McDowall, who was a legitimately great athlete but still an unknown quantity in Raleigh. When the Wolfpack intercepted a pass early in the game, McDowall and Jennette lined up in the backfield and looked like contenders for real players for a squad that managed just a 2-6-2 record the year before under one-year coach Buck Shaw.
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Taking over, McDowall was responsible for State’s final two scores in the 20-0 victory, a 5-yard pass to Jennette and a 10-yard pass to Walter Shuford, Charlie’s brother.
McDowall set up field position for the final touchdown with a 75-yard kickoff return down the sidelines that was a precursor for earning his longtime college football nickname of “Spindle Legs.”
The headline in the next day’s News & Observer: “State Uncovers
Brilliant Young Man in Jack McDowall, of Rockingham.” The NC State student
newspaper called him: “The fast-stepping halfback from Rockingham.”
State finished the season just 3-5-1 but two years later, in McDowall’s final season, Tebell’s team won the only Southern Conference football championship in school history. McDowall was the team’s MVP, an All-Southern selection and the winner of the Norris Athletic Trophy as the school’s top-performing athlete. He was recognized as the top athlete in the school’s first 50 and first 75 years of athletics.
After spending 30 years as an administrator at Rollins College in his home state, McDowall was elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame (1965), the College Football Hall of Fame (1975) and the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame (2014).
And it all started with a Friday night home-opener against Richmond.
Here’s a feature story about McDowall from a 2014 issue of The Wolfpacker, when he was inducted into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame.
BY TIM PEELER
© Coman Publishing, 2014
RALEIGH, N.C. – One afternoon on the dusty backroads of central Florida, Jack McDowall was at a gas station playing pool with friends. The spindly legged halfback had completed his high school football career and chose not to go back for any more classes.
Out of the blue, someone from Rockingham, N.C., possibly out-of-state high school coach Shorty Lawrence, stopped to get gas. Whether the stranger was a recruiter, a bird dog or just someone who knew about the skinny kid from Newberry, Fla., isn’t exactly clear. But the guy offered McDowall room and board, plus $25 a week if he would move to North Carolina and play football one more year at Rockingham High School.
 |
| Longtime Rollins College administrator, Jack McDowell. |
McDowall, who came from an abusive home, didn’t need convincing. He sneaked out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night and headed north for athletic glory.
“They recruited in high school back then,” McDowall explained in a newspaper feature. “I stayed in a boarding house in Rockingham and the people there treated me fine.”
After helping Rockingham High finish second in the 1923 eastern state finals, McDowall went back to his homestate hoping to play for Florida, but the Gator coaching staff thought he was too small. He was lured back to NC State College to play freshman ball in 1924 and he went on to become the most successful student-athlete in the school’s first three quarters of a century. His accomplishments are largely unknown by fans who get their new via videos and social media.
Mostly all that remains of his accomplishments – he twice won all-Southern Conference honors in football, basketball and baseball -- are on the yellowed newspapers of a scrapbook that now belongs to his grandson. But now that he has been elected into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame, his name will be etched into the granite of history.
All because he was found in a pool hall while playing hooky from school. For years after he became a successful athlete, coach and administrator, every time he passed by a filling station and saw directionless loiterers, he would say: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
There’s never been an athlete at NC State quite like John Witherspoon McDowall. A multi-sport star, he did a little of everything, and excelled at all of them.
He was captain and star of NC State’s only Southern Conference football champion (1927). He also played basketball under football/basketball coach Gus Tebell. (As a sophomore basketball player in 1925, he scored a buzzer-beater in a 28-27 victory over Duke.) He was a member of the baseball team, but double-timed in the spring as a member of the track and field team, often leaving the baseball field in his uniform to do his high jump, then return for his turn at bat.
In 1928, he set the state record in the high jump – 6-feet, 1-1/4-inches – a record that was expected to last a long, long time.
“He was one of those ‘Saturday Athletes,’” Tebell once said of McDowall. “He never exerted himself during the week in practice, but he did unbelievable things in a pinch. I have coached many fine athletes, but I never saw one who could touch him.”
The Norris Cup, a precursor to the Alumni Athletics Trophy, was an award voted on by the students for the top student-athlete on State College’s campus. McDowall, who won it in 1927 and ’28, is the only person to win it twice.
In 1927, the most successful season in NC State football history until Earle Edwards arrived in the early 1950s, McDowall returned to his native state to face Florida, the hometown school that didn’t bother to recruit him. It was a chance for personal redemption in a couple of ways, since it was the only time in his life that McDowall’s father ever saw him play college football.
In the game, McDowall threw a touchdown pass and returned an interception 75 yards for a touchdown, both scores in the Wolfpack’s 12-6 upset in Tampa. The win propelled the Pack to its only Southern Conference football title thanks to a perfect 4-0 league record.
McDowall helped solidify that trophy with a pair of 65-yard runs against Davidson in Greensboro. Tebell’s Pack won its final eight games that season to finish 9-1 overall.
McDowall left school in 1928 to take a head coaching position at Asheville High School, though he kept in touch with the folks in Raleigh since his younger brother Luke also played football at the school. In his lone season in Asheville, his football team won nine of 10 games and his basketball team won 21 consecutive contests.
He returned to Florida in 1929 to become the head football coach at Rollins College in Winter Park. He was barely older than the players he coached, many of whom he recruited from the mountains of North Carolina.
“He bought a big house near the campus, with lots of different bedrooms,” said McDowall’s grandson Mason Blake, an attorney in Melbourne, Fla. “They all lived there with him and my grandmother and helped them raise my mother.
“He always prided himself on the relationships he developed as a coach and was always very proud of the accomplishments of his players.”
McDowall spent three decades as the football coach, physical education teacher and athletics director at Rollins. He earned a master’s degree from Duke and became a professor of psychology at Rollins. He retired from active teaching in 1956, but remained part of the campus community until his death in 1969.
He served as lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was elected to several political positions in Orange County (Fla.).
In 1965, he became the first NC State graduate and second Wolfpack representative elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, a year after legendary basketball coach Everett Case was part of the hall’s second class. In 1975, the halfback known as “Spindle Legs” was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Sally, the daughter raised by McDowall's players in the family boarding house, had three children: two sons who live in Florida and a daughter who lives in Tennessee.
“We couldn’t be happier that he has been honored by NC State,” Mason Blake said. “The school meant so much to him because of the opportunity it provided.”
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
