NC State’s season made a loud statement, even without an ACC Atlantic Division title
So N.C. State’s win over North Carolina was just a win over North Carolina. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
N.C. State’s fate wasn’t decided Saturday, hours and hundreds of miles away, when Wake Forest won easily at Boston College to wrangle the Atlantic Division title away from the Wolfpack. It was decided two weeks ago, on a cold night in Winston-Salem, when the Wolfpack let Wake Forest off the hook.
That felt in that moment like a game to decide the division and it turned out to be exactly that.
You know who had a worse day than N.C. State? The poor sap charged with selling tickets to a Wake-Pittsburgh championship game in Charlotte next Saturday. Charlotte’s got a lot ... of six-for-one ticket deals with your Food Lion MVP card, even if that figures to be a high-scoring shootout between two elite QBs.
Still, for 16 or so hours after the Wolfpack’s improbable comeback Friday night, the dream was alive. Now that it has died, and N.C. State remains the only longtime ACC member without at least one football division title, it would be easy, from afar, to dismiss this season as yet another missed opportunity for a program that has missed too many of them.
To a degree it was — the Wolfpack’s win over Clemson opened doors that had long remained closed to N.C. State, even if the Wolfpack left their thresholds uncrossed in the end — but in the bigger picture this season established a trend line going in the right direction, built on the momentum gathered during a difficult COVID experience and further demonstrated that N.C. State’s 4-8 collapse in 2019 was entirely an aberration.
There were certainly the all-too-familiar losses in pivotal games, whether it was the loss at Mississippi State that deprived the Wolfpack of an opportunity to make a splash on the national stage, or the inability to beat a reeling Miami team as a three-point road favorite, or the Wake game.
But there was far more to the good, starting with finally getting past Clemson in a down year when not beating the Tigers would have been the greatest missed opportunity of all. (Even then, it took the win over North Carolina to truly knock Clemson out of division contention.) Dave Doeren may have been premature with his talk of curses being dismissed, as the Wolfpack’s record in Winston-Salem would later prove, but he had every right to celebrate that win with a drink and a cigar.
Perhaps more than any curse, it took care of the Clemson mystique, puncturing the veil of invincibility that had enveloped the Tigers against N.C. State. Something always interfered, whether it was a missed chip shot or an untimely penalty or a player incorrectly called out of bounds. Not this time.
Other than Miami, N.C. State took care of business, winning the kind of games against teams like Boston College and Louisville and Syracuse that had tripped up the Wolfpack so many times in the past.
And then, of course, there was Friday night, and a comeback that ranked as unlikely and improbable even by the bizarro-world standards of the State-Carolina rivalry. Whether you credit N.C. State for its grit and resilience in the face of insurmountable odds or mock UNC for a catastrophic collapse -- both are true -- it was a truly epic way to finish the regular season.
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Even if it didn’t, in the end, matter in the most important way.
There was poetry in long-suffering Emeka Emezie, a player who in some ways epitomized the past five seasons of N.C. State football, scoring both of the late touchdowns to erase a nine-point deficit, a player who had been through all the ups and downs -- including his famous fumble at Wake Forest in 2018 -- exiting Carter-Finley on the ultimate high.
With an array of attractive bowl possibilities -- Orlando’s Cheez-It Bowl appears most likely -- N.C. State has now won eight or more regular-season games in four of the past five seasons and, at 9-3, has a chance to win 10 for the first time since Philip Rivers and Chuck Amato got a parade for beating Notre Dame in the Gator Bowl.
Those are real milestones, even without a division title to go with them. In Doeren’s perpetual quest for respect, that’s how you get it. With or without a parade. With or without a victory cigar.
This story was originally published November 27, 2021 at 3:25 PM with the headline "NC State’s season made a loud statement, even without an ACC Atlantic Division title."
