North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: There's No Crying on Senior Day
11/15/2010 12:00:00 AM | Football
Nov. 15, 2010
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. – Nate Irving vowed to himself that he wouldn’t cry. He didn’t want to be the butt of any jokes from his teammates for shedding tears on Senior Day.
Instead, he made the Wake Forest offensive players want to bawl, with ferocious hits in the backfield that have never been matched in NC State’s football history.
The senior from Wallace, N.C., who sat out all of last season following a near-fatal car crash, admits he might have been overly emotional after he came out of the tunnel leading from the Murphy Center, ran onto the field at Carter-Finley Stadium, hugged his parents and said “I gotta go to work.”
But he didn’t cry. At least not the way he did some 18 months ago when he thought his football career might be over following his early-morning, single-car accident. He shed plenty of tears the afternoon he stood on the steps inside the Murphy Center and announced to the media that he would have to take a medical redshirt for what would have been his junior season.
Those were the toughest days of his life, watching his teammates play the 2009 season without him.
So he’s tried to make the most of his second chance in life. And football.
That was never more apparent than Saturday’s 38-3 victory over the Demon Deacons, a game the Wolfpack needed to win to maintain its advantage in the ACC’s Atlantic Division race. Now, if the Wolfpack wins its final two games on the road, it will advance to the league’s championship game in Charlotte on Dec. 4.
But Irving was so filled with emotion just after Saturday’s kickoff, he wasn’t sure he would make a tackle all day.
“Nate will be the first to admit – the first two series, he was horrible,” NC State coach Tom O’Brien said Monday afternoon in his weekly press conference. “He probably had the chance for three more tackles for loss in the first two series that he didn’t make. He was just too emotional.
“As soon he settled down, he took off.”
Irving made a school-record eight tackles for loss, two more than the previous record held by former NFL No. 1 pick Mario Williams. Irving now has 18.5 tackles behind the line of scrimmage this season, which ranks third in the nation.
His teammates noticed early that Irving was playing with a little extra intensity.
In the first quarter, quarterback Russell Wilson was sitting between Jarvis Williams and Owen Spencer, marveling at the way Irving was playing on defense.
“I told them, ‘Nate might have 50 tackles today,’” Wilson said. “I really thought that, too.“
Instead, he finished with 13 total hits, leading a defense that stymied Wake Forest all afternoon, holding the Deacons just 188 yards of total offense. The Wolfpack defense was spectacular in the second half, limiting Wake to just one first down in the third quarter and just 51 yards of total offense in the second half.
Meanwhile, Wilson and the offense exploded for 28 unanswered points after intermission.
The game was touching for O’Brien, who well-remembered the morning he stood in a hospital room looking at Irving’s seemingly lifeless body, connected to several medical monitors and a breathing tube.
He stood quietly with Irving’s parents, not knowing whether his team’s best defensive player would ever walk, much less walk back onto the football field. But, after several surgeries and more than a year of recovery, Irving returned to action.
And that’s what made the former Marine officer a little misty eyed when he saw Irving hug his parents prior to Saturday’s kickoff.
Irving switched to middle linebacker in the spring and has been the Wolfpack’s leading tackler most of the season. But he’s never played quite like he did against Wake Forest, rushing across the line to make ferocious hits and chasing down Deacon backs all afternoon long. Sunday and Monday, his teammates and classmates were still talking about the pile-driving tackle he put on Wake Forest running back Michael Canazaro, as part of the goal-line stand the Wolfpack made just before halftime.
“A lot of people keep bringing it up to me, but I haven’t really talked much about it because I didn’t think too much of it,” Irving said. “I just thought it was another game. I was trying to make good plays for my team.”
But Irving knew the game was special. He talked with Wilson, his fellow co-captain along with Williams, about what it was going to be like going onto the field at Carter-Finley for their final game together.
“Nate’s been so focused on this season and what he has to do for the team that he doesn’t talk about what it all means to him,” Wilson said. “At the same time, it does hit him every now and then. He has those moments where he realizes he got a second chance in life.
“It’s a real blessing.”
Now, Irving and his teammates are headed to Chapel Hill to face North Carolina, in another game the Wolfpack needs to win if it hopes to advance to the ACC title game.
He knows he’ll be just as hyped going into this game as he was last week’s contest.
“With me, at the beginning of every game, it takes me a play or two to settle down,” Irving said. “I still to this day come into every game with butterflies in my stomach and a little jittery. At least until I get a few plays under my belt.
“I don’t expect anything different against Carolina.”
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
