Tim Peeler: Looking back at NC State's ties, including the 1986 edition against Pitt

In the world of college football with overtime, which has been the case since 1997, the concept of good ties and bad ties are a little foreign to modern fans but are fundamentally true for gridiron fans of old.

In NC State’s history, for instance, there has been a strong mixture of both among the 51 recorded ties in the Wolfpack football record books.

Good tie: 11-11, vs. North Carolina on Oct. 7, 1899. It was the first time North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts had ever scored in a game against their rivals and the closest it had ever come to actually beating the Tar Heels. In celebration, NC State students burned down the young school’s only outhouse.

Bad tie: 8-8. With a chance to tie Duke for the 1960 ACC championship, all the Wolfpack had to do was beat lowly South Carolina in a road game at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina. However, ACC Player of the Year Roman Gabriel was knocked out of action early in the first quarter and didn’t return until it was almost too late. When he came back in the third period, the Wolfpack was down 8-0. However, Gabriel engineered a 59-yard touchdown drive, thanks to a 24-yard pass to George Vollmar, who then pitched the ball to fellow end Jim Tapp, who ran untouched the final 35 yards into the end zone. Jim D’Antonio ran in the two-point conversion to tie the game. South Carolina missed two field-goal attempts, including one of just 17 yards, in the fourth quarter, while NC State missed on a 43-yard attempt by tackle Nick Maravich. The Blue Devils won the league title by default, despite losing to North Carolina in its season finale.

Good tie: 31-31 vs. Houston, on Dec. 23, 1974, in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl at the Astrodome. Down 31-17 with 3:38 remaining against the homestanding Cougars, head coach Lou Holtz’s No. 10-ranked Wolfpack scored two touchdowns and a two-point conversion in just over a minute to tie underdog Houston. Quarterback Dave Buckey scored the final touchdown on a 1-yard rush, and fullback Stan Fritts added the tying points on the conversion attempt. Holtz’s team finished No. 9 in the final UPI poll and No. 11 in the Associated Press poll, the highest football final rankings in school history.

Bad tie: 43-43, vs. Duke on Nov. 12, 1988. After leading 40-25 going into the fourth quarter, the Wolfpack’s highly regarded defense allowed the Blue Devils to score two touchdowns and a field goal in the final period. In the end, freshman Damon Hartman kicked a 37-yard field goal as time expired to complete the highest-scoring tie in NCAA history and the last ever recorded before the NCAA instituted overtime for the 1995 bowl season and the 1996 regular season. The tie prevented third-year head coach Dick Sheridan from completing his first regular season with nine victories, though he did reach that total in each of his final two seasons in 1991 and ’92.

Best tie: 14-14. In the annals of sister-kissing football, one of the best in the Wolfpack’s history was on Sept. 13, 1986, when Pittsburgh visited Carter-Finley Stadium for the second game of Sheridan’s tenure at State. It was a transformative season for the Wolfpack, which had endured three consecutive 3-8 seasons under head coach Tom Reed and had not qualified for a postseason bowl game since 1978.

The Panthers, which had beaten Reed’s Wolfpack 24-10 the previous season in Pittsburgh, dominated on defense in the first 55 minutes of the 1986 game, holding the Wolfpack offense to only two rushing plays of longer than 5 yards. During one stretch of six possessions, State made just one first down and was held to 10 yards of total offense.

Sheridan and his first-year staff handed the offense over to eventual ACC Player of the Year Erik Kramer, the former junior college part-time starter at quarterback who later had an extensive NFL career.

With Pitt leading 14-0, the Pack finally got on the board with a 24-yard field goal by Mike Cofer late in the third quarter.

Kramer then excelled in the final five minutes of the game, moving the ball 70 yards down the field through the air and on a 20-yard quarterback scramble. He hit favorite receiver Haywood Jeffires on a 7-yard touchdown pass, followed by a completion to Nasrallah Worthen for two extra points to draw the Pack within 14-11.

State had every chance to win the game, getting the ball back quickly after Pitt fumbled a punt snap that the Wolfpack recovered at the 16-yard line with 1:50 to play. However, a penalty and a rushing play for lost yardage set the Pack back and it needed a 49-yard field goal from Cofer to knot the score at 14 against the heavily favored Panthers.

That deadlock encouraged and inspired the Pack, which reeled off five heart-racing wins in its next six games, losing only at Georgia Tech. Three of the five wins came on last-possession scores by the Wolfpack and an 27-3 upset of 16^th-ranked Clemson on national television.

The South Carolina game that season is likely the greatest comeback win in Carter-Finley Stadium, at least until the 2021 victory over North Carolina in which Devin Leary threw four touchdowns and guided the Pack to a pair of scores in the final minute of the 34-30 victory. Wide receiver Danny Peebles caught a touchdown pass after time expired thanks to an offsides penalty on the Gamecock defense, called as the visitors prematurely celebrated the victory.

It was a costly win, however, Kramer suffered a sprained ankle that kept him out of the next week’s showdown against Virginia. State defender Derrick Taylor kept the score close with a 88-yard interception return, and kicker Cofer hit a 49-yard field goal to give the Pack a 10-7 halftime lead.

Virginia scored on its first possession of the second half and added a pair of field goals in the fourth quarter, while State, guided by a gimping Kramer off the bench, managed only two field goals.

NC State didn’t need last-second heroics to win its final two regular-season games but could have used something in a game against Bill Dooley’s Virginia Tech in the New Peach Bowl. The Pack thought it had secured its first bowl victory since beating Pittsburgh in 1978 when Cofer scored his team’s only points of the second half on a 33-yard field goal with 1:53 on the clock.

Dooley, the former UNC coach, had a few tricks up his sleeve for the Wolfpack, including having his offensive line feign injury on the team’s final drive to set up a game-winning 25-24 field goal by kicker Chris Kinzer with 40 seconds remaining at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

In the end, though, it was a program-shifting season for the Wolfpack, which started with an unlikely tie against the Panthers. Sheridan, who set the school’s winning percentage record with his 52-29-3 record at State, was named both the ACC Coach of the Year and the Bobby Dodd National Coach of the Year for the turnaround season. Kramer was named both the ACC Player of the Year and the New Peach Bowl Outstanding Offensive Player.

The loss to the Hokies ate at Wolfpack fans for years, but even in retirement Sheridan refused to grouse about it, even when he returned in 2016 to NC State to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of that 1986 season or to celebrate his delayed 2020 induction into the College Football Hall of Fame at the ceremony in 2023.

“Over the course of a coaching career, you win some like that and you lose some like that,” said the coach, who died on July 6, 2023. “It all evens out in the end, but we certainly had our share of them go our way that season.”

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