North Carolina State University Athletics
Wolfpack Needs Seventh Win to be Safe
11/20/2000 12:00:00 AM | Football
At 6-4 on the season, the NC State football team is bowl eligible. What exactly does that mean? Well, it means what it says. But the words 'eligible' and 'guarantee' are not synonyms.
With its exciting offense, incomparable freshman quarterback and proclivity for playing close games, the Wolfpack would be an attractive choice for a lot of bowls. But the Pack will be even more attractive if it can finish up at 7-4 overall and 4-4 in the ACC. To make that happen, NC State must beat Wake Forest in its regular season finale this Saturday at Carter-Finley Stadium.
So the question beckons: Does the Pack need to win this week to assure itself of a postseason bowl berth?
"Whether we need it or we don't, we want to win this week," said NC State coach Chuck Amato. "We need this win to help as a building block in this program. There's no question that if we win this week we'll get a bowl invitation."
The ACC has bowl tie-ins with the Gator, Peach, and Micron PC Bowls, plus two games in Hawaii. Last Saturday's loss at Virginia probably eliminated the Wolfpack's chances of landing a bid to the Peach Bowl. Clemson has already accepted an invitation to represent the league in the Gator. More than likely, a win over Wake Forest would send NC State back to the Micron PC Bowl, a game in which it competed in 1998.
However, a season ending loss to the Deacons could make the Pack's postseason chances a little more tenuous. A minimum of five teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference will go bowling. With their wins last weekend, North Carolina and Virginia became the fifth and sixth teams from the league to become bowl eligible.
"I really think we need to win the game to get that invitation we've been looking for," said senior linebacker Clayton White. "We were hoping we would get that invitation this past weekend, but unfortunately we didn't. We've got one more chance to get it. We've got to make sure we get this win so we can get an invitation."
NC State will have one other morsel of motivation working in its favor this week: the returning players will get an opportunity to avenge last year's humiliating 31-7 loss to the Deacons.
"I wasn't here, but I heard about it and I reminded them (his players) about it," Amato said.
During Amato's weekly press conference on Monday, word filtered down that Carl Torbush had been fired as the head coach at the University of North Carolina.
Said Amato: "Carl's a great man, he really is. I've known him for years with him being an assistant coach and me being an assistant coach. That's part of it; people want the fix and they want it now. Mack Brown was 2-20 in his first two years. It takes a while. There may be more reasons to why coach Brown left to go to Texas other than the financial package. Just go back eight or nine years ago and there was talk that Virginia Tech was going to release an outstanding coach in Frank Beamer. By keeping him like they did, look what happened. It takes time."
Over the last few years, Beamer has built Virginia Tech into a national powerhouse.
