North Carolina State University Athletics
Drive Against Arkansas State Launched The Pack
10/18/2000 12:00:00 AM | Football
By Tony Haynes
Trailing Arkansas State, 24-21, the NC State offense stood 89-yards away from the south end zone at Carter-Finley Stadium. For new Wolfpack football coach Chuck Amato, it must have seemed more like a mile. Philip Rivers, the freshman quarterback playing in his first college game, somehow needed to lead his team into field goal position in the final 2:18 just to force an overtime.
Every successful football season always seems to feature that one special defining moment that serves as a launching pad. For NC State, that defining moment may have come in the final drive of the opening game against Arkansas State.
Starting from its own 11, the Wolfpack methodically marched its way down the rain soaked Carter-Finley field. On first down, Ray Robinson ripped off a 12-yard run on a draw play. Two plays later, receiver Koren Robinson worked his way in between a cornerback and safety on a corner route to haul in a perfectly thrown Rivers pass for 29-yards.
Later, facing fourth and 10 from the Arkansas State 34, Rivers came up big again, hitting Bryan Peterson across the middle for 24-yards to the Indians' 10. After three incompletions, kicker Kent Passingham nailed the game-tying 33-yard field goal with just one second showing on the clock.
NC State went on to post a 38-31 win in double-overtime and the rest, they say, is history. The next week at Indiana, the Pack rallied from 12 down with just over four minutes to play in a 41-38 victory over the Hoosiers. The two improbable triumphs produced a bonding effect between the players, coaches and fans. And along the way, the quarterback went from being Philip Rivers the 18-year-old college freshman to Philip Rivers the NC State legend.
"If we don't have him in the first game, we don't even go into overtime," Amato said. "If we don't have him in the second game at Indiana, we lose that one and we're 0-2. If that happens we might beat SMU the next week or we might not. Then comes Georgia Tech and we could have been 1-3 or 0-4. After that it's Clemson and North Carolina. We won two games early that did more for the program than anything in how we won them. I'm telling you, if we don't win that opener we could be 0-5 or 1-6 at this point."
Now 5-1, the Wolfpack is ranked in the top 25 (24th), and its only loss, a seven-point defeat to No. 4 Clemson on the road, was certainly no embarrassment.
"They are overachievers," Amato says of his players.
The opening night struggle against Arkansas State surprised most of the 50,000 NC State partisans who had come to Carter-Finley on September 2 expecting a Chuck Amato coronation party. The coach, however, knew better. Just a few weeks before the opener, Amato warned his staff that it could be a very long season.
"Before the season we were in a little hideaway and I told them it's going to be a tough season," Amato said. "We were thinking maybe one or two wins. I said, 'all the media is just waiting for us to get off to a 1-5 start so they can rip us.'"
Instead, there have been stories about one of the most surprising teams in the country, a team that plays with reckless abandon and never stops until the final whistle. And the imaginative offense, which, among other things, has featured a double reverse pass to the quarterback, has everyone asking, "what will they do next?"
"I really haven't thought about the impact that we've made because when you're coaching everyday and every week, you don't do that," Amato said. "It's been like a fairy tale so far and we're just waiting for someone to pinch us and wake us up."
The first chapter of this fairy tale begins this way: "Trailing Arkansas State, 24-21, the NC State offense stood 89-yards away from the south end zone at Carter-Finley Stadium."
A defining moment.
