NC State football and Wake Forest met once before when both ranked

The more storylines change, the more they stay the same — especially when it comes to those like NC State football earning respect.

That was certainly the topic of the day 29 years ago when it entered the final game of the 1992 regular season with a Homecoming and Senior Day contest against Wake Forest, which was having its best seasons in decades under retiring head coach Bill Dooley.

That Nov. 21 contest was the only time in the history of the Wolfpack’s longest running rivalry that both teams were ranked in the major college football polls, NC State 13th and Wake Forest 25th.

Yet it was the Demon Deacons, riding a six-game winning streak, who earned all the publicity prior to the game, thanks to its first national ranking in 14 years.

The Deacons had been picked to finish last in the not-yet-divisioned ACC, but they rallied behind their exiting coach, a face familiar to the Wolfpack thanks to his 11-year tenure at North Carolina, his stolen Peach Bowl victory over the Wolfpack in 1986 in his final game at Virginia Tech and his return to the ACC in six years at Wake Forest.

Dooley’s team rallied after losing three of its first four games with an impressive winning streak that included road wins at Vanderbilt, Maryland, Duke and Georgia Tech and unlikely home wins over Army and Clemson.

Before the game against the Wolfpack kicked off, the Deacons had already been invited to participate in the Independence Bowl, the program’s second postseason game since joining the ACC in 1953.

To make matters worse, NC State senior quarterback Terry Jordan opened a local newspaper on the day of the game to see that the weekly “Who Has the Edge” box in the game preview listed mostly Wake Forest advantages.

“I was really mad when I read the newspaper this morning,” Jordan said. “There was a breakdown of the game, and Wake Forest seemed to have the edge in everything—quarterback, running backs, linebackers, secondary.

“Everybody on the team was talking about it. It just gave us that much more incentive.”

What happened, though, in a Wolfpack 42-14 blowout in the regular-season finale for both teams, was a dominating performance by an NC State senior class of 20 players that won 40 games over a five-year span. The win gave head coach Dick Sheridan and his team nine wins in the regular season for the second consecutive year and matched the most ever in school history.

The Pack, led by Jordan and thousand-yard rusher Anthony Barbour, won the game with an offensive explosion, posting its third 40-point game of the season after beating Texas Tech 48-13 and, the week before, Duke 45-27. It was just the fourth time in school history that the Wolfpack had that many 40-plus games.

After the game, the News & Observer wrote a story saying the graphic used in its story had reversed the teams in the edge checklist and that State should have been favored in several categories, not the Deacons.

“That ticked me off,” Jordan said. “I think that shows us we don’t get any respect. That really got me mad. Maybe you need to reverse them from now on because it got everyone pumped up. That was good.”

Both Barbour (20 carries for 133 yards) and running back Greg Manior (14 runs for 102) rushed for more than 100 yards in the blowout, with senior Aubrey Shaw adding another 38 in the battle for respect. State’s offense piled up 300 rushing yards in its 442 yards of total offense in what Sheridan called the best performance of the season.

“We had read all week about how this was Coach Dooley’s last game and about how he had done such a great coaching job,” Shaw said after the game.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, Coach Dooley is a great coach, but we wanted to remind everybody that this was our last game and that we’ve got a really good team, too.”

Senior defensive leaders David Merritt, Ricky Logo, Sebastian Savage and Ricky Turner held Wake scoreless for three quarters.

Merritt set the tone early when he intercepted Deacon quarterback Keith West’s second pass attempt on the fourth play of the game, ending West’s streak of 122 passes without a pickoff. Five plays later, the Wolfpack scored the first of five unanswered touchdowns to take a 35-0 lead heading into the final period.

“All we had heard about was how it was Coach Dooley’s last game and how they had won at Georgia Tech last week and how emotional it would be for them,” Merritt said. “But we had a lot to play for, too.

“We were emotional, too.”

Wake outscored the Wolfpack 14-7 in the fourth quarter, but that had no bearing on the game’s outcome. The Wolfpack ended Dooley’s ACC coaching career the same way it started it back in 1967 with a 13-7 loss in his first game at North Carolina.

NC State football finished the season 9-3-1 and was second in the ACC standings behind first-year member Florida State. The victory was Sheridan’s fifth in a row over Dooley and the Deacons, who tied for fourth in the ACC’s final standings.

Four days later, Dooley was named The Associated Press ACC Coach of the Year, beating out newcomer Bobby Bowden of Florida State, 96-6. Sheridan received two votes. It was the third time Dooley was named the league’s top coach.

Despite the dominating win, the Wolfpack saw its hopes to go to one of the major bowls — either the Orange or Fiesta, both of which had scouts in attendance, along with the Gator — dashed in the week after the game.

“This football program is still building,” Logo said after the game. “We’d like to be considered with the likes of Notre Dame, Florida State and Michigan, and to be up there, we need to play in a major bowl.”

Instead, Sheridan’s team received its fifth consecutive postseason bid, invited to play Florida in the Gator Bowl, where the home-standing Gators upset the favored Pack 27-10 in a biblical fog on New Year’s Eve and denied Sheridan’s team the first double-digit win total in school history.

As fate would have it, the game was not only the final ACC game for Dooley, it was also the final ACC game and home game for Sheridan, who resigned for health reasons the next summer, just before the start of preseason drills. Assistant Mike O’Cain was named his replacement, while the Deacons hired future NFL head coach Jim Caldwell, who coached the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl in 2009, to replace Dooley.

Since then, both coaches have been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame (Dooley in 1994 and Sheridan in 2020). Sheridan was recognized on the field at Carter-Finley two weeks ago for his accomplishment during the NC State football win over Louisville.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at [email protected].

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