North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: A Handful of NCSU-SC Football History
8/28/2008 12:00:00 AM | Football
BY TIM PEELER
COLUMBIA, S.C. Dana Bible remembers how young, but talented, the team was. He felt it was a team that was on the verge of putting things together, building a program that could be successful in the ACC.
But there were so few successes on the field back in the early part of the 1985 season. Anything that could go wrong, did go wrong: home losses to East Carolina, Georgia Tech, Furman, Maryland and North Carolina; injuries galore; pressure from the fanbase and the administration to turn things around in the third season of Tom Reed’s tenure as head coach.
So on Nov. 2, 1985, Bible walked into Williams-Brice Stadium leading an offense that had a handful of National Football League players and relatively little success all season long. That’s why the Wolfpack was 1-7 heading into the game.
It was a different time, and different circumstances, than Thursday night’s season-opener against the Gamecocks, which kicks off at 8 p.m. For Bible, who returned to the Wolfpack sidelines last season as Tom O’Brien’s offensive coordinator, it will create a few more waves of memories of his first time at NC State.
Nothing that happened in the first three quarters of that game 23 years ago on a rain-slickened field suggested the Wolfpack was about to turn things around. NC State had a 6-3 lead going into the final period, but Reed and his team were seemingly waiting for something to go wrong.
It did. An interception that Wolfpack defensive back Jeff Gethers returned for a touchdown was nullified by a personal foul penalty, even though a flag was never thrown. Quarterback Erik Kramer, a junior college transfer who had been hobbled throughout the season, had to leave the game, giving way to another California kid, John Heinle, under center for the Wolfpack. Two plays later, Heinle threw an interception that was returned 48 yards for a touchdown. Good-bye lead.
The Gamecocks scored again just minutes later to take a 17-6 lead in front of a sold-out crowd of 69,100 fans. Things looked bleak, right up until Kramer returned to the game and completed seven consecutive passes. One of those was a seven-yard touchdown pass to Jeffires. Kramer then hobbled into the end zone for a two-point conversion that cut the Gamecock lead to just three points.
With less than two minutes to play, the Wolfpack got the ball back on its own 25-yard-line, with fading hopes of pulling off a comeback. But Kramer hit Jeffires’ fingertips at the 50-yard line and the future NFL All-Pro batted it into the air for about seven yards before finally gaining control. When he did, all the Gamecock defenders had stopped, and Jeffires waltzed into the end zone for a 75-yard touchdown catch with 1:19 to play, giving the Pack a 21-17 lead.
“Haywood could always make something happen,” said Reed, who still lives in Raleigh and is an occasional visitor to NC State’s football practice. “He was a free spirit. In those days, I really didn’t understand free spirits as well as I do today, but that is who Haywood was.”
The Gamecocks’ chances of retaking the lead seemed unlikely. Quarterback Mike Hold had already been sacked six times by a Wolfpack defense that had only 10 sacks in the season’s first eight games. But on first down, Hold hit Thomas Denby for a 48-yard pass. Only a last-ditch dive by NC State’s Gethers saved a go-ahead touchdown.
Hold took the Gamecocks to the 4-yard line, with four plays and 45 seconds to get the ball into end zone. On first down, Hold threw an incomplete pass in the end zone. On second down, defensive tackle Reggie Singletary met fullback Kevin White in the backfield for a four-yard loss. On third down, Hold completed a pass to Eric Poole, but he was out of bounds. On fourth down, Hold was rushed out of the pocket, back to the 22-yard-line, where he flung a pass to an open Poole.
But Gethers, making his second big play of the drive, knocked the ball away to end the contest, giving the Wolfpack one of the biggest wins of the Reed era and ending a five game losing streak in Columbia. Singletary dominated the game from the defensive line, recording 12 tackles and recording four sacks to win the Dick Christy Award as NC State’s most valuable player against the Gamecocks. (Sacks weren’t an official statistic then, but Mario Williams is the only player in NC State history to match Singletary’s total in that game.)
“At that point in time, we had a very young team,” Bible recalled after practice earlier this week. “We felt that the young players were gaining experience and we were improving as an offense. We were better in the latter part of the season than we were in the beginning. We felt like we were gaining momentum.”
The next week, State eliminated a Virginia team that had its sights set on an ACC Championship, thanks to the play of quarterback Don Majkowski, running back Barry Word and an offensive line coached by fourth-year assistant Tom O’Brien. The Pack won that game 23-22, thanks to another late-game stand, for the only home ACC win of Reed’s three-year tenure.
A year later, with mostly the same lineup, first-year coach Dick Sheridan led the Wolfpack to an 8-3-1 record and a berth in The New Peach Bowl in Atlanta. Included in those wins was one of the most memorable games in the history of Carter-Finley Stadium: with time expired, a hobbled Kramer found freshman wide receiver Danny Peebles in a crowded end zone for a 23-22 victory.
And, as Bible mentioned, the core of the ’85 team was talented. Kramer eventually played 14 seasons of professional football, first as a replacement player with the Atlanta Falcons and in the Canadian Football League. In 1991, in his first season as starter in Detroit, he guided the Lions to the AFC Championship game. He also started games for the Chicago Bears and the San Diego Chargers before retiring.
Jeffires, a Greensboro native, became one of the NFL’s most productive receivers during his nine years with the Houston Oilers, a primary outlet for Warren Moon in the famed Run & Shoot offense.
“When Haywood got here, he was young and not physically strong yet,” Bible recalled. “He was a little immature. He played and grew up quickly. I remember him improving in leaps and bounds.”
Singletary spent eight years in the NFL, with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Green Bay Packers.
The Wolfpack and Gamecocks, who once played against each other in 35 of 36 seasons from 1956-91, have met only once since the regular series ended, in 1999 in Lou Holtz first game as the Gamecocks head coach. The Pack won that game as well, 10-0, in a pouring rain storm.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
