NC State football and its history of canceled games adds another
With every new generation, it seems the world is covered with virgin, unplowed snow. Yet everything that happens has probably happened before, which is why it’s not surprising that some NC State football fans may not know that Tuesday’s canceled football game between the Wolfpack and UCLA is not the first time the Wolfpack has had a game wiped off the schedule, although it is the first bowl contest to be nixed.
In fact, there have been at least 19 games that were called off or moved to another time over the last nearly 115 years, which is about one every six years. Considering five of those cancellations happened in one season and another five happened over the span of five years, they are less common than the numbers show.
They aren’t, however, unprecedented.
Tuesday was the second cancellation in the past four seasons. In 2018, the West Virginia game was cancelled due to Hurricane Florence, which was the first NC State football game canceled for any reason in exactly 30 years and was the first canceled outright because of weather since 1908, meaning there have been several generations of Wolfpack fans who have no recollection of them.
The list below — which I hope is comprehensive, but probably isn’t because of the fluidity of college athletic scheduling in the earliest years of college athletics — doesn’t even count the games that were almost canceled because of bad weather, assassinations or supply-chain problems.
We live in a violent, flawed world.
On Nov. 23, 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was shot by in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, NC State and Wake Forest decided to go ahead with their Friday night game at Riddick Stadium, since both teams were already at the field and prepared to play when the news that Kennedy had died was confirmed. The Wolfpack’s 42-0 victory gave head coach Earle Edwards his second ACC title.
The Wolfpack’s Nov. 16, 1974, game at Arizona State was nearly canceled because of the national gasoline shortage that created long lines at gas stations everywhere. Wake Forest canceled its game at Oregon State for that reason, but NC State decided to go ahead with its game against the Sun Devils, a 35-14 victory that solidified the Pack’s berth in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston.
And, those who were around in 1996 for Hurricane Fran surely remember that there was much discussion before and after that devastating hurricane hit Raleigh on Sept. 7 whether the Pack’s home opener against Georgia Tech should have been played at Carter-Finley Stadium. It was, thanks to a Herculean effort by the facilities staff, with the Yellow Jackets taking a 28-16 victory.
So, without further delay, here is a list of the cancelled games, dating back to head coach Michie Whitehurst’s second season as head coach of the North Carolina College for Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (NC A&M):
Nov. 14, 1908: A late-fall snowstorm dropped 12 inches of snow on Lexington, Virginia, forcing Washington & Lee to cancel its scheduled home game at Wilson Field.
The Aggies, as NC State was often called in those days, finished the season with a 6-1 record, with its only blemish coming at Virginia on Halloween Day. (This is the only NC State game I know of that was canceled because of weather.)
Sept. 29-Nov. 5, 1918: During the world’s worst Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed three times as many people as World War I, newly re-named NC State College canceled five scheduled games when all extracurricular activities, including football practice and military drills, were prohibited. I
n addition, seven starters from the 1917 team were among the 35 students drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Camp Gordon near Atlanta. A total of 13 students and two nurses in the infirmary died of the flu.
When activities resumed, it was just in time for State College’s game against John Heisman’s unbeaten and unscored on Golden Tornado of Georgia Tech. The overmatched Aggies, even with the addition of five players on weekend leave from Camp Gordon, suffered the worst lost in school history, 128-0, in a game that was cut short five minutes before the final whistle.
Dec. 7, 1929: The season finale between NC State College and Mississippi A&M (now Mississippi State) slated for Starkville was canceled by the home team because both teams were having difficult seasons and there was a concern about a lack of interest by home fans.
The Wolfpack was 1-6 that season, while the Bulldogs were 1-5-2. The game was moved to two years later, with Mississippi State coming to Raleigh in 1931.
November 1944-47: During World War II, NC State was home to U.S. Army trainees, who were not allowed by order of the military to participate in varsity athletics. UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke were home to U.S. Navy and Marine trainees during the war, all of whom were allowed to participate in varsity athletics.
The NC State athletics council voted to cancel games against the Blue Devils and the White Phantoms (as UNC’s teams were then known) throughout the duration of the war. The Duke series resumed in 1945, but UNC refused to play State College until 1947.
Oct. 4, 1952: After five UNC-Chapel Hill athletes, including one football player, contracted highly contagious polio, the Tar Heels canceled games against NC State and Georgia.
Both the Wolfpack and Bulldogs scrambled to find a way to replace the lost game. NC State asked Davidson to move the scheduled game between the two in-state rivals back a week so it could host the Bulldogs at Riddick Stadium on Oct. 4.
Davidson resisted the move and NC State made plans to play Georgia in an early game in Raleigh, and then travel by train to Davidson for the night game in the day-night, two-city doubleheader.
Davidson eventually relented and moved its game to a week later. The Wolfpack, under first year coach Horace Hendrickson, lost to Georgia 49-0 and beat Davidson 28-6 en route to a 3-7 season. That’s the last time NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill haven’t met during the regular season.
Sept. 3, 1988-92: After 18 consecutive years of playing East Carolina (17 times in Raleigh, once in Greenville), athletics director Jim Valvano canceled the five agreed-on games against the Pirates, following an incident after the 1987 game in which more than 2,000 eye-patched fans stormed the field following a 32-13 ECU victory, causing $7,200 in damage to a fence in the south end zone.
Valvano and head coach Dick Sheridan replaced ECU with a home-and-home series with Division I-AA Western Carolina and Kent State from 1988-91 and Division I-AA Appalachian State in 1992.
State and ECU did meet following the 1991 regular season when both were invited to the 1992 Peach Bowl in Atlanta, a game the Pirates won 37-34 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. T
he series did not resume in the regular season until 1996 with a neutral-site contest in Charlotte after the North Carolina General Assembly got involved to encourage both the Wolfpack and UNC-Chapel Hill to play their smaller in-state sister institution.
Sept. 13, 2001: NC State was scheduled to play Ohio University two days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. The Thursday night game was postponed until the end of the season. The Wolfpack, under second-year head coach Chuck Amato, won the game 27-7 on Thanksgiving weekend.
Sept. 15, 2018: Seven trillion gallons of water from Hurricane Florence inundated most of North Carolina with rain over a 72-hour period, forcing most athletic activities across the state, including NC State’s game against West Virginia, to be canceled or postponed.
Rather than reschedule, a choice made by the Mountaineers, NC State added a game against East Carolina, in which the Pack thumped the Pirates, 58-3.
Dec. 28, 2021: In what will hopefully go down as the only cancellation forced on NC State football by the COVID-19 pandemic, UCLA backed out of the San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl less than five hours before kickoff, leaving Wolfpack coaches and its administration simultaneously stunned and furious.
In the Wolfpack’s record book, the game will go down as a UCLA forfeit, and the Holiday Bowl trophy flew back to Raleigh with NC State.
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