Innocent Fun, Contemplated: NC State vs. UNC Football

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

By and large, the NC State-North Carolina football rivalry has been relatively prank free, likely because of an admonition given by one of the state’s foremost leaders at the turn of the 20^th century.

Writing in NC State's Red & White student newspaper, the sports editor said: “Innocent fun in all may be contemplated, but is in the highest degree reprehensible and should receive more than passing consideration.”

The scolder, writing in 1903, was future North Carolina governor O. Max Gardner, who played football at both NC State, as an undergraduate, and UNC, as a graduate law student. For the most part, students from both schools have listened to him – at least for football.

Basketball has been a different matter, as students have been much more active, generally with spray paint and stolen trinkets such as championship banners.

Students from UNC have painted NC State’s iconic and hallowed Free Expression Tunnel and the base of the Memorial Tower on Hillsborough Street so often that the NC State Student Government hosts an annual “Ram Roast” pep rally at the Brickyard before every home basketball game against UNC to protect the tunnel from light blue paint.

For years, throughout the 1970s into current times, the student newspapers printed fake editions of the other school’s paper to not-so-gently stir up passion for the rivalry. Usually, UNC’s Daily Tar Heel generates a spoof issue during football season and NC State’s Technician prints a spoof issue during basketball season for the Tar Heels’ trip to Raleigh.

Here, without in any way endorsing vandalism or violence, are some of the better pranks through the years.

• As early as 1933, NC State students banded together to steal UNC’s live mascot, an adult sheep named Rameses, from the Orange County family farm where it lived. When leadership groups from NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke got together on Nov. 14, 1933, to discuss improving relations among the student bodies, just before the State-Carolina football game, Rameses disappeared from Jack Hogan's farm. The mascot was returned before the game. Jack Hogan was a former football player at UNC. His family has provided a home for every Rameses mascot since 1925. It was at this time that NC State students began raising money to purchase a live wolf for its home football game. The school went through several of those through the years (1935, 1947, 1966 specifically), and it was never stolen. Since 2010, State has used a Tamaskan husky named Tuffy, which resembles a live wolf, to serve as its game-day mascot.
•  In 1935. State students marched two cows and a sheep onto the field of Riddick Stadium, right in front of sitting governors Ehringhaus and Gardner. The sheep was rumored to have been kidnapped from the Hogan farm, but it was not. The feisty lamb escaped from custody just before kickoff and romped around the Riddick field.
  
• In 1942, after a delegation of UNC students defaced a building on NC State’s campus with chalk graffiti, four carloads of NC State College students sneaked over to Hogan’s farm in Chapel Hill to steal the UNC mascot, Rameses III, the week before the annual rivalry. The front half of the ram was turned red with a vegetable dye, and the back half was turned blue. UNC officials were upset and threatened to cancel the annual contest. “All athletic relations may be discontinued if students from both schools lose their heads and start a serious fracas,” said UNC system comptroller W.D. Carmichael, a former UNC basketball player and university administrator who has gymnasiums at both schools named for him. State’s entire student body gathered at Riddick Stadium and voted unanimously to return the ram. Most of the UNC student body was on hand the day before the game for the sheep’s return, but another group of State students stole Rameses III from the first group of State students before it could be returned. “Our neighbors can get our ram, but never our goat,” wrote the Daily Tar Heel. Student leaders all met for dinner at a Chapel Hill restaurant. Unlike most low-budget World War II-rationed gatherings, mutton was not served. NC State responded with its second consecutive win over the Tar Heels after a 13-year winless drought.
• In November 1947 NC State students painted red “NCS” letters on seven locations around UNC’s campus, including the Institute of Government’s Highway Patrol Training area and Quonset Hut No. 8.
• Wake Forest once tried to steal North Carolina’s mascot from Hogan Farm in 1965, but got the retired version of Rameses VII, not the newly incarnated Rameses VIII. Later that year, Duke students stole Rameses VIII before the annual Duke-UNC game.
• On Oct. 15, 1982, the Daily Tar Heel published a fake edition of NC State’s student newspaper, the Technician, just before the two schools played a football game in Chapel Hill. In response, during basketball season Technician published a fake edition called the Daily Tar Hell, which included, among other things, a photo of Dean Smith laying naked at center court of Carmichael Auditorium. The next day, NC State beat the defending national champion Tar Heels in Reynolds Coliseum, thanks, in part, to a ginned up student body and an overheated Smith, who got two technical fouls in the game. The next edition of Technician read: “Dean loses clothes on Friday, cool on Saturday.”
• In 1986, the two editors-in-chief wagered on the football game, both agreeing that the winning school would be recognized by having the losing school’s newspaper printed in the color of the winning team. When NC State beat UNC at Kenan Stadium by one point, 35-34, the banner of the Daily Tar Heel was printed in red. It was State’s first win in eight seasons against the Tar Heels.
• On Feb, 25, 1996, NC State students were blamed when Rameses XXIII was repeatedly stabbed, gutted and disfigured on the Hogan family farm just before the 1996 ACC basketball tournament. However, it was later discovered the death was caused by an intoxicated man seeking food, not a college prank.
• Following a spate of light blue creativity in the early 2000s at NC State's Free Expression Tunnel that made a lot of money for Big Spray Paint, State loyalists retaliated by painting "NCS" in red on several Chapel Hill landmarks, including the iconic Old Well. After drawing widespread condemnation from administrators on both campuses, student and social media and adults throughout the state, in 2005 the NC State Student Ambassadors turned the school's traditional pregame pep rally into a twice-a-year branded event called the Ram Roast, where groups and organizations spend three-hour shifts protecting the tunnel from an azure future. It's held before the football rivalry game between the two schools and home basketball games against the Tar Heels.  Through the years, it featured players, coaches, entertainment and prize giveaways and is still ongoing.
  

"The Brown-And-White From State..."

 

Aerial view of the Cotton States and International Exposition. [Photo by Fred L. Howe.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

When 75 students from the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts left Raleigh for Atlanta to play in the five-year-old school’s first out-of-state football game, the players had no idea who the opponent was going to be.

That means no scouting report, no berating college yells, no opposing-color ribbons to wear on the fans' lapels.

That’s because there was no one scheduled for the Oct. 25, 1895, game at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta’s acclaimed world’s fair that hosted nearly 800,000 people during its 100-day run in what is now called Piedmont Park.

At the time, there were enough teams of this emerging new sport making their own trek to the South’s new capital to make all necessary arrangements once they got there. So Bart Gatling, the UNC- and Harvard-educated Raleigh lawyer who moonlighted for three years as A&M’s football coach, found representatives from a military school from Virginia and asked if they were free the next day.

This was an important moment in the history of North Carolina’s technical school, traveling two states away for an athletics contest on what was unofficially declared “North Carolina Week” at the exposition. The students and three accompanying professors even skipped all four days of the North Carolina State Fair, which at the time was within walking distance of the two buildings that comprised the state’s land-grant institution.

The Cotton States and International Exposition was a big draw. President Grover Cleveland opened it by flipping a switch remotely from his home in Massachusetts and made a train trip from Washington the day before the A&M-VMI football game to see the wonders of the fair. Booker T. Washington gave his controversial “Atlanta Compromise” speech a few weeks earlier. There was a “Coochee-Coochee” burlesque show just outside the main gate. [Photos from the exposition.]

The traveling students, pretty much the entirety of the school population, could see the Liberty Bell, which was delivered from Philadelphia via train and wagon. They could take in one of Buffalo Bill's daily Wild West Shows. They could see a remarkable motion-picture projection device or visited villages representing Japan, Egypt and several countries of South America. If they had too much fun, they could try a new headache and hangover remedy that was being served in Atlanta drugstores called Coca-Cola.

When the football team made it to town after a lively train ride, which included properly chaperoned students from Raleigh’s three women’s colleges, they again broke out their newest school colors, brown and white, which replaced the original pink-and-blue colors that were established with the first team in 1892.

The found representatives from the much more experienced program at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The VMI squad had already won four games, all played at home, by a combined score of 118-0. There was little hope for the inexperienced A&M squad, which lost 36-0 to the North Carolina scrubs and tied Wake Forest 4-4 earlier in the week, the opportunity to even score against such a mighty foe as the Keydets was dim for a roster full of farm boys and someone who is likely the first native of Japan to play college football, Teisaku Sugishita.

The star player for the A&M team was Syd Alexander, known today as the namesake of Alexander Residence Hall, but the resumes of the other players on the team are mostly lost to history.

The game was called for 2:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon at the Atlanta athletic fields. The next day and the following Friday, teams from UNC and Georgia met for two games at the same location. Among the other games played during the course of the exposition was Georgia's season-ending contest against Auburn.

Cadets from both schools marched to the bleachers in formation and a total of approximately 1,500 fans ringed the sidelines for the game  

On the opening kickoff, VMI fumbled the ball and A&M player W.R. Vick picked it up and ran for a touchdown to end VMI’s scoreless streak, a hopeful start to the first road game in school history.

However...

“The six was made on a fluke—one of those accidents that happen even in as scientific a game as football,” wrote the Atlanta Journal. It turned out to be the only score of the day for the boys from Raleigh.

In fact, according to the account in The Atlanta Constitution, it was the only time AMC crossed midfield the entire game. The rest of the game – played in two 35-minute halves, with a 10-minute break in between – belonged to VMI’s cadets. They scored seven consecutive touchdowns to win the game 42-6.

VMI cadets still wear red-lined capes as part of their first-class uniforms.

“The Virginians were out in force, with their voices, their red-lined capes turned wrongside out, and their tin horns, and a better backing football team never got. In the second half, the Tar Heels never got the ball, but were crowded unmercifully all over the field,” the Constitution wrote, referring to the A&M school with the nickname used for all schools from North Carolina. “They had virtually given up at this point.”

On the way home the next day, the train carrying the A&M players, students and professors stopped in Charlotte, just long enough for the football team to post a 0-0 tie against the team from the Charlotte Commercial College at Latta Park, the team’s fourth game in a week. That game is not recognized in the NC State record books.

“Within the past week A&M has played four games, in which several of her best players were disabled,” wrote The Charlotte Observer. “Also during the past three nights the men have lost much sleep, so that they were not in good condition.”

Charlotte Commercial College was a business training school located in downtown that eventually merged with Raleigh’s King College in 1901 to become a for-profit business technology and health-care training school. It closed in 2018 due to low enrollment.

It was a fairly devastating week for AMC football, with a two losses and two ties. The students decided they no longer wanted brown and white as school colors. A poll of students in November, settled on red and white, perhaps remembering those inside-out capes worn by the VMI cadets. The faculty adopted the change, but emphatically admonished the Athletic Association that this decision must stand, “unless reversed by a vote of two-thirds of the student body.”

Such a vote has never been taken.

A month after the end of the football season, the Board of Trustees issued a short-lived ban on all intercollegiate athletics, similar to the one Wake Forest passed on its campus immediately following its 4-4 tie with A&M. While Wake’s athletic ban lasted 18 years, while A&M’s decision was reversed quickly, in time for a 1896 baseball season and a one-game football season.

 

Piedmont Park during the Cotton States and International Exposition.

Pat Dye: The Bear Bryant of Eastern North Carolina Football

Patrick Fain Dye, the day he was hired as East Carolina's head football coach. [East Carolina University Digital Archives Collection.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2020

There have been more important times in the state of North Carolina’s football history, but it’s hard to beat the winter of 1979-80 for outright turbulence and madness.

NC State won the ACC championship with a 7-4 overall record and a 5-1 mark against conference opponents. It did not play in the postseason. Instead, second-place Clemson was invited to the Peach Bowl. Fifth-place North Carolina, with a 3-3 record in the seven-team conference, was invited to the Gator Bowl, where it upset Michigan, 17-15. And fourth-place Wake Forest, with a 3-2 ACC mark, was invited to the Tangerine Bowl, where it lost to LSU, 34-10.

East Carolina, having tied North Carolina and gone unbeaten in their final seven games, finished with a 7-3-1 record, the fourth consecutive season the Pirates had finished with seven or more wins under its young phenom coach Pat Dye. After not receiving a bowl bid – the Pirates had upset Louisiana Tech in the 1978 Independence Bowl the year before – Dye quit.

While he was rumored to have other possibilities, he did not have another job. He just up and resigned, then blasted his athletics director and chancellor for not giving enough support to the football program, in terms of facilities and funding.

Dye called his $38,000 base salary and his overall $60,000 take-home pay “more than enough.” He said the athletics director off him a raise, thinking “he could keep me here with money. But I wanted his support for the football program, not the money.”

Dye had been a hot commodity for a while. In 1977, the season after he led the Pirates to their only Southern Conference football championship, he interviewed to become the head coach at North Carolina. East Carolina, discouraged by system president Bill Friday from pilfering a coach from a sister institution, wouldn’t let Dye out of his contract and the Tar Heels chose to hire Ohio University head coach Dick Crum instead.

"I'm not sure North Carolina wants a national championship football team," Dye told The Charlotte Observer's Tom Sorensen in 1981. "I probably shouldn't say this...I'm not sure they want that much athletic success. Going to the Gator Bowl seems successful enough for them."

In 1978, Mississippi State offered Dye its head coaching position, but Dye declined.

“I could have left any year I was here,” Dye said after his resignation from ECU. “Just last year Mississippi State made a very lucrative offer and everyone – my staff, my family – want to pack up and go. But every year I always looked for a good reason to stay. This time, I didn’t even bother. I knew before the season even began that I would leave. I knew I couldn’t be enthusiastic like I was in the past. I knew I needed a change of scenery, a new challenge.”

At the same time, NC State coach Bo Rein, still the youngest head coach in Division I football at the age of 34, left after his fourth season at NC State to become the head at Southeastern Conference superpower Louisiana State. By all reasonable accounts, Rein did not think he could challenge for a national championship at NC State in the same way he could at LSU.

(Rein never got the opportunity to coach the Bayou Bengals. His plane went down on a recruiting trip not long after he was hired and he and the pilot both perished.)

Dye quietly campaigned for the NC State job. He said he could definitely win a national championship in Raleigh. Instead, Wolfpack athletics director Willis Casey formed an eight-person screening committee to hire a new coach. Casey was in the middle of an extended stay at Rex Hospital recovering from “an undisclosed illness.” From his bed, Casey considered Dye and a pair of former Wolfpack players from the school’s successful 1967 team, quarterback Jim Donnan and linebacker Chuck Amato.

Dye was the feisty sort, as presidents and athletics directors in the SEC eventually discovered. He was never feistier, however, than the 1979 season.

“I had something happen in the beginning of the year in 1979,” Dye told the East Carolina fansite Bonesville in 2004. “I didn’t want to release a player. We had a kid who played backup quarterback and had gone through the entire spring and then decided he wanted to transfer to Duke. I didn’t want him going there and running their scout team all fall when we had to line up and open the season for them. But, the athletics director and the president released him anyway. They decided to release him against my wishes and, actually, I didn’t even know that they did it.”

Duke, with the former Pirate quarterback running the scout team the week before the game, beat ECU 28-14 in the third game of the 1979 season.

“[The president] started telling us how to do our jobs,” Dye said in the Bonesville interview. “I learned that what I thought was true and I kept that in the back of my mind until the end of the season. I didn’t want it hanging over my head. We had a good year in 1979 and certainly the good times outweighed the bad…[but] I couldn’t work for someone I couldn’t trust. So, rather than trying to fight the institution – which is always more important than the individual – I thought it was best to move on. I didn’t want to damage East Carolina. I don’t regret the decision because I knew it was the right thing to do. I hated leaving those players and leaving East Carolina and Greenville. At the time, I was 40 years old and I had some good years left. I wasn’t worried about finding a job because I knew… I knew I could coach… for somebody.”

In six years at East Carolina, Dye had built a successful, winning program, leading the Pirates to the 1976 Southern Conference championship and an all-time 48-18-1 record. He won at least seven games in each of his six seasons and left Greenville with a 72.4 winning percentage. In his final season, the Pirates led the nation in rushing with Dye’s ground-grinding wishbone offense.

Pirate fans wanted the second most successful coach in school history to stay put, for obvious reasons. Someone in Greenville made a small fortune selling bumper stickers that read, “Keep Pat – fire the rest.”

Dye thought he would land at NC State. Dye had been an assistant coach at Alabama under Bear Bryant when NC State chancellor Joab Thomas was an Alabama professor of biology, the assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the vice president of student affairs in Tuscaloosa (1961-75).

Dye, the son of a Georgia cotton farmer and a former captain of Georgia’s football team with quarterback Fran Tarkenton, seemed like the perfect fit for the school’s fanbase.

NC State’s screening committee backed off Dye because of his comments, according to Charlotte Observer columnist Bob Quincy. The coach quickly issued an apology in an attempt to regain favor, but the damage was done.

"I just told it the was it was," Dye told the Raleigh News & Observer's Chip Alexander in a 1985 interview. "Sometimes, the truth hurts, you know. And, yes, it probably cost me the job at State."

Some were also concerned that the wishbone offense Dye learned under Alabama’s Bear Bryant was too conservative. Never mind that the Wolfpack was just a year removed from Rein’s highly successful twin veer option, featuring all-time ACC rushing leader Ted Brown.

So the committee recommended to Casey that the school hire Lou Holtz defensive lieutenant Monte Kiffin from Arkansas. The 39-year-old Kiffin was hired less than a week after Rein’s resignation.

Dye landed at Wyoming, where he immediately upset the school by suggested leading the Cowboys to success would open doors for other opportunities. He quickly had to back-track those comments.

“This is in no way a stepping stone for me,” Dye said. “I hope it will be a stepping stone for some of our assistant coaches, because we do have an outstanding staff. As far as my position at Wyoming, I’d like to build a program here where, if we’re at Laramie 15 years from now, we can look back and be proud that we were a part of it.”

He left after taking the Cowboys to their first winning season in eight years to become the head coach at Auburn, ending his one-year exile west of the Mississippi. He took the job at Alabama's biggest rival against Bryant's advice.

"The people of Wyoming are talking about rodeoing in July," Dye said. "In Alabama, they are talking about the Auburn-Alabama game."

Dye had nine 9-win seasons in 18 years of coaching before he abruptly retired from Auburn following the 1992 season at the age of 51, as the NCAA began to poke around his recruiting practices. In 12 seasons, he compiled a 99-39-4 record with the Tigers, won at least a share of the SEC championships in 1983 and ’87-’89, coached Heisman Trophy winner Bo Jackson and won at least 10 games four times.

He won three SEC Coach of the Year awards and was the 1983 national coach of the year.

But he never won a championship at NC State.

A Fan-Free, Secret Game That Changed Everything

© Tim Peeler, 2020

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It’s long-forgotten now, but there was a time NC State hosted a men’s basketball game against High Point College that was played without spectators.

It wasn’t because of illness though, like the current worldwide coronavirus pandemic that forced NCAA president Mark Emmert today to ban all unnecessary personnel and family from this year’s men’s and women’s NCAA Championships.

It was because NC State’s home court, Thompson Gymnasium, was actually condemned by Raleigh officials.

The “secret game,” as the newspapers called it back then, that followed was one of the seminal moments of March Madness in North Carolina, even though it was played in January.

The saga began in 1947, Case’s first season, when a Red Terror home game against North Carolina was cancelled because of too many spectators. Thousands of students, most of whom were World War II veterans enrolled on the GI Bill, flooded through the second-floor windows and up through the basement lockerrooms to see the first of two scheduled games against the two neighboring rivals.

When fans sat on each other’s laps and crowded into the aisles, fire marshal W.C. Butts called the game, setting off riots on NC State’s campus. The Terrors went on to beat the White Phantoms, as Carolina teams were often called then, in Chapel Hill, 48-46, the first of 15 consecutive victories over UNC-CH and the beginning of a 24 out of 27 streak against State College’s biggest rival over the next decade.

That inaugural season, Case’s team finished with a 26-5 record, its first Southern Conference championship in nearly two decades and a berth in the National Invitation Tournament at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Case became a hero, even though his team played in a decrepit old gym that barely held 4,000 spectators.

By the 1947-48 season, interest in NC State basketball was so high students could only get tickets to half the games and were not allowed to bring dates, which was problematic because almost all of the military veterans enrolled in school were already married. No staff, faculty or general admission tickets were sold for home games after December.

On Jan. 23, 1948, Duke was scheduled to play at Thompson Gym, but Raleigh building inspector Pallie Mangum and city manager Roy Braden conducted a surprise inspection the afternoon of the game and decided that it had to be canceled because the building had inadequate fire exits for more than 1,200 spectators.

The Wolfpack was forced to move its final seven home games that year to Raleigh’s downtown Memorial Auditorium.

There wasn’t enough time, however, to get the auditorium ready for the Pack’s next home game, a Friday night contest against High Point College. The auditorium was built in 1934 to be basketball ready, since the Southern Conference moved its tournament to Raleigh when seven schools broke away to form the Southeastern Conference. But the floor had not yet been refinished, the sidelines and free-throw lines needed to be painted and baskets needed to be installed in order to play seven unexpected games in February and March.

After telling everyone on campus and in Raleigh that the High Point game was cancelled, officials from both schools agreed to secretly play in condemned Thompson Gym, with no fans in attendance. Only a few reporters and college officials were allowed to see the game featuring Case’s Wolfpack, the nation’s highest-scoring team.

Red-headed All-America forward Dick Dickey poured in a school-record 29 points and teammate Jack McComas added 23. Case’s Wolfpack ran roughshod over the High Pointers with a 110-40 victory.

Case’s free-wheeling team made 44 of 97 shots – in front of no one.

The vagabond Pack weren’t affected by its home-court flux throughout the season. It was the highest-scoring team in the nation for most of the season and it earned the school’s first No. 1 ranking in the national polls. Thanks to a 19-game winning streak from December-March, the Pack finished 29-3 overall, was a perfect 12-0 in the Southern Conference regular season and won the second of six consecutive league tournament titles, despite Dickey being out of the lineup with a case of the mumps.

At least it wasn’t the Covid-19.

It was the highest-scoring game in NC State history until David Thompson came along three dozen years later. It was also the last game Case ever coached in Thompson Gym, where he compiled a perfect 18-0 record in his one-and-a-half seasons at his first home court.

Passed over by the NCAA in favor of eventual national-champion Kentucky for the eight-team NCAA Tournament, the 1947-48 Wolfpack accepted its second consecutive bid to the National Invitation Tournament. Without Dickey, the Pack lost to DePaul in the first round at Madison Square Garden.

Still, it was the most successful season in NC State basketball history until the 1972-73 team posted a perfect 27-0 record.

The move to downtown Raleigh lit a fire under school officials – as Case slyly expected – to complete the shell of the on-campus coliseum that had been standing dormant since 1941. It didn’t hurt that during an 81-42 victory over North Carolina at the Pack’s substitute home, students finished off the game by chanting “We want a coliseum. We want a coliseum.”

Few of the surviving folks at that game would know if Mangum and Braden, the two elected city officials, were truly looking out for the well-being of those wanting to see the game, or if they were in cahoots with Case, a legendary sneak who usually got what he wanted.

What is known for certain, however, is that the palatial on-campus basketball coliseum the coach was promised when he interviewed for the job the year before was re-envisioned, expanded on the fly and completed within 18 months of the fan-free game.

Called Reynolds Coliseum, it hosted more spectators for college basketball games than any other on-campus facility during its 50 years as the home of NC State’s men’s basketball team, the host of the Southern and Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments, the Dixie and Triangle Classics and the NCAA Championships. The home of the Wolfpack Women’s program since 1973-74, renovated and updated Reynolds will soon surpass the men’s half-century of service.

So, who knows? Wednesday’s decision by the NCAA to host fan-free tournaments may reinvigorate college basketball, not destroy it.