A Football Sprinter, Like Ted Brown Used to Be

Many a defender fell flat on his face trying to catch Ted Brown.

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

Ted Brown never won an Atlantic Coast Conference championship as a member of NC State’s football team, but it's a little remembered part of history that the league’s all-time leading rusher did help the Wolfpack win the first 4x100-meter relay at the 1978 track and field championships.

Like current Wolfpack leading rusher Nyheim Hines, a junior who has helped win back-to-back 4x100-meter titles at the ACC meet and is now the football team's top rushing threat, Brown used his natural speed in both sports, though he's mostly remembered for holding the ACC career rushing record of 4,602 yards ever since his career ended in 1978.

In fact, the NC State track program has greatly benefited from having football players on its roster, and the football program has benefited from borrowing track recruits. Both Danny Peebles and Alvis Whitted were originally recruited for track, but ended up playing professional football in the NFL.

Since that first race in ’78, NC State has won a total of 12 titles in the 4x100, the second most of any ACC school. Of those titles, 10 had at least one football player in the lineup, including the two most recent with Hines.

Peebles, of course, helped win four ACC titles and one NCAA title during his career from 1985-88. His son Dylan, a freshman, ran the anchor leg of last year’s title race with Hines.

For Brown, running track at State was just a natural extension of his track career at High Point’s Andrews High School. Frankly, he doesn’t remember how long he ran track at State and the records from those years are pretty spotty.

In 1978, following a record-setting junior year in which he rushed for 1,251 yards and 14 touchdowns, Brown helped the Wolfpack track team set the stage for breaking Maryland’s strangle-hold on the ACC title. The Terps won their 23^rd consecutive conference crown that year, but not without being pushed by coach Jim Wescott’s Wolfpack.

By 1982, with the help of a couple key football players and new head coach Tom Jones, the Wolfpack started a championship streak of its own, winning seven consecutive men’s outdoor track championships.

Brown says he never participated in a spring football practice. In fact, head coach Bo Rein, who took over for Lou Holtz after Brown’s freshman year, never had a spring game. He cancelled the scheduled 1976 Red and White Game the day before it was supposed to be played at Carter Stadium and had only spring-ending scrimmages after that.

So Brown wasn’t necessarily needed. Besides, he says, track did him more good than football during the off-season.

“I ran track to help my speed and to be in better shape,” Brown says. “In track, we ran every day, in bad weather, no matter what we had going on. In football, we would lift weights one day and run gassers the next and not always focus on sprinting.

“I always felt like I was in better shape coming into the fall after I ran track in the spring.”

Brown was fortunate to be on the same team as a world-class sprinter who helped the Wolfpack win that inaugural 4x100 title.

His name was Albert Lomotey, a native of Ghana who had qualified to be on his country’s 1976 Olympic team. He never competed in the Montreal Games, however, because of the 1976 African boycott.

Instead, the diminutive Lomotey—who stood all of 5-feet, 4-inches—enrolled at Pembroke State in the fall of 1976, but transferred to NC State in the winter of 1977 because his country gave him a scholarship to study agricultural science. He was not eligible to run in 1977, joined the track team for a spectacular 1978 season. (He left school after that to return to Africa, and neither he nor Brown ran track in 1979.)

With Brown leading the way, the Wolfpack’s relay team won the 440-yard relay at the fifth-annual Atlantic Coast Relays hosted by NC State at the Paul Derr Track. They were at their peak that April when they went to Clemson for the ACC Championship meet, where all anyone wanted to talk about was Maryland freshman sensation Renaldo Nehemiah, who had set a world indoor record in the 110-meter high hurdles before he enrolled in college.

The 6-feet, 1-inch Nehemiah out-leaned Lomotey to win the 100-meter dash by .01 seconds, but the heralded freshman slipped out of the blocks in the 200 meters and Lomotey won the race in an ACC-record 21.09 seconds. Nehemiah also finished second in both hurdles races.

Brown liked being on the track because of his relative anonymity. He had just completed his second 1,000-yard season with the Wolfpack and was already being hyped as a Heisman candidate for his senior campaign that fall.

“Running track, I was incognito and under the radar,” Brown says.

He was also a huge asset in getting the Wolfpack sprinters off to a good start.

“The reason they wanted me in the leadoff position was I had a very quick first step and the ability to get out fast,” Brown says. “The main goal was for us to be in position to get to Lomotey. If we got him the baton with the lead or only one or two steps to make up, it was over.”

Kind of like when Touchdown Ted, who still owns the ACC record for career rushing touchdowns and scoring, had the ball in his hands and the end zone in his sights.

NC State’s 4x100-meter ACC champions
Year	Time	Team
1978	40.44	Ted Brown, Calvin Lanier, Darryl Patterson, Albert Lomotey
1980	40.18	Marcus Smith, Ed McIntyre, Brian Burns, Ron Foreman
1981	40.65	Auguston Young, Ed McIntyre, Greg Smith, Marcus Smith
1983	39.93	Perry Williams, Dee Dee Hoggard, Alston Glenn, Harvey McSwain
1985	39.17	Auguston Young, Alston Glenn, Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain*
1986	39.59	Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
1987	39.90	Malcolm Branham, Dwight Frazier, Darian Bryant, Danny Peebles
1988	40.23	Danny Peebles, Harvey McSwain, Jake Howard, Dwight Frazier
1989	40.00	Darian Bryant, Kevin Braunskill, Michael Brooks, Dwight Frazier
1996	39.92	Butch McClelland, Neil Chance, Lloyd Harrison, Alvis Whitted
2016	39.42	Quashawn Cunningham, Shannon Patterson, Nyheim Hines, Jonathan Addison
2017	39.17	Nyheim Hines, Cravont Charleston, Junpai Dowdy, Dylan Peebles
Football players in bold
*NCAA Champion

 

From Bottom 10 to Top 20

Lou Holtz recorded his first win at NC State against Syracuse on Sept. 16, 1972.
(Photo by Ed Caram)

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

On opposite sidelines were two future College Football Hall of Fame coaches, one nearing the end of his superstar-producing career and one just starting at his first big-time school.

And it was the young one who played old-school football.

On Sept. 16, 1972, Syracuse came to Carter Stadium to face NC State in the first meeting between the future ACC rivals.

The Orangemen, as they were then called, were led by legendary coach Ben Schwartzwalder, who was famous for churning out running backs like Jim Brown, Floyd Little, Ernie Davis and Larry Csonka. He had been at the upstate New York school since 1949 and was a legend among fellow coaches.

The Wolfpack was led by a brash peanut of a coach named Lou Holtz, who had come from William & Mary to take over the program from interim coach Al Michaels, a one-year fix following the abrupt retirement of longtime coach Earle Edwards. Michaels led the Pack to a 3-8 record in his lone season, and returned to his previous position as defensive coordinator under Holtz.

Edwards, who had played at Penn State, and Schwartzwalder, who had played at West Virginia, were longtime friends, coaching colleagues and past presidents of the American Football Coaches Association.

Steve Harvey began his syndicated Bottom 20 in 1972.

There was little doubt about who would win the nighttime contest at Carter Stadium. Oddsmakers listed Syracuse as much as a 24-point favorite. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Steve Harvey had started a syndicated feature in the preseason called “The Bottom 10,” in which he listed NC State No. 8 among the worst teams in college football heading into his inaugural season rankings.

That didn’t change following the Wolfpack’s season-opening 24-24 tie at Carter Stadium against Maryland, which was No. 3 in Harvey’s rankings.

So everyone thought it would be Syracuse in a landslide.

Except that it wasn’t.

In a stunning upset for the time, Holtz recorded his first victory as NC State’s coach with an overwhelming 43-20 victory over the Orangemen, as three different quarterbacks led the Wolfpack on scoring drives.

Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder.

“They licked our butts,” Schwartzwalder said after the game.

Holtz hit the Orangemen with twin offensive platoons, switching back and forth with separate 11-man lineups, one led by junior Bruce Shaw and the other led by freshman quarterback Dave Buckey. They switched on nearly every other possession throughout the game. Then, late in the game, third-stringer George Clements came in to lead the Wolfpack to its final touchdown.

Shaw started and had the better passing day, completing four of his six passes for 113 yards. He also had a couple of miscues under center against a celebrated Syracuse defense that included All-America tackle Joe Ehrmann. His fumble at the Pack’s 29-yard line in the first quarter set up the game’s first score.

Buckey, an 18-year-old, 165-pound freshman from Akron, Ohio, had a breakout game, making him (and twin brother Don) one of the poster children for the return of freshman eligibility to college athletics. Later that season, as Dave and Don helped the Wolfpack win six of its final seven regular-season games, they became the only NC State football players to ever be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Dave and Don Buckey were Oct. 30, 1972, cover boys.

Buckey, in just his second game in a Wolfpack uniform, rushed for a touchdown, threw for another and set up a third with a 57-yard third-quarter run. He hit nine of his 15 passes for an even 100 yards and ran for a game-high 110 yards on 11 carries, outdistancing all four of the Wolfpack’s talented running backs, Willie Burden, Roland Hooks, Stan Fritts and Charley Young.

“I had played a little in the first game,” said Dave Buckey, who still lives in Raleigh some 45 years later. “I knew I would play a little more in this one because Coach Holtz said so that week. Syracuse was a big, solid football team, sort of like traditional Big Ten teams.

“They were a lot bigger and stronger than we were.”

They weren’t, however, deeper on either side of the ball. The Orangemen did have some injuries on offense, including to its starting tailback, and Schwartzwalder had suspended three defensive players for their involvement in taking a rug out of another student’s dormitory room, leaving them back in Syracuse for the game. Perhaps that was an indication of his confidence in recording the road win.

“Our second offense, probably got 25-30 percent of the playing time, which was exactly the way Coach Holtz planned it,” said Don Buckey, who caught one pass for 17 yards against Syracuse. “It was a little bit of a shocker to us that he did that in the opener, but after that we expected it.

“We had great respect for Syracuse, but we did not quite know what to expect from a competitive standpoint. It turned into somewhat of a runaway. After that, we were all believers in Coach Holtz, his staff and our system.”

Dave Buckey certainly left an impression on Schwartzwalder.

“I can’t believe he is only a freshman,” said the coach, who died in 1993. “He has so much poise.”

Holtz, not atypically, was not pleased after the program-building victory. He thought his two offenses had too many mistakes.

“Yes, we’ve turned the corner, but I have found that every time you turn a corner, there’s always another one waiting,” Holtz said. “We won and I’m very pleased, but I really didn’t think we had crispness on offense that we need.

“However, it is a great feeling to win our first game here at North Carolina State.”

He also did not like the paltry crowd of just 27,100 for the nighttime contest.

“I hope more people come to our games,” he said afterwards. “I want to fill the stadium.”

NC State beat West Virginia 49-13 in the 1972 Peach Bowl.
(Photo by Ed Caram.)

Even though the Pack lost its next two games, at North Carolina (34-33) and at Georgia (28-22), it finished the season on a roll, winning seven of its final eight games, including a 49-13 throttling of Bobby Bowden-coached West Virginia in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta.

Pack finished the season with a 9-3-1 record and was No. 17 in the final Associated Press poll, completing the unlikely turnaround from preseason Bottom 10 to end-of-season Top 20.

Holtz took his team to three more bowl games over the next three seasons and spent at least some time ranked in the Top 20 in each of the next three years, including a No. 11 finish in the final poll of 1974, the highest AP finish in school history.

Holtz lost just one home game while at NC State, a 30-22 loss to Wake Forest in 1975, posting a 20-1-1 record at Carter Stadium.

And most of the time, in what was truly the Golden Age of Wolfpack athletics, all the seats were full.