East Carolina-NC State and other under-the-radar rivalries really pack a punch

Let's start with a personal memory, shall we?

Saturday, Sept. 10, 1983. Night had fallen and traffic was moving slowly as our aircraft carrier Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale was sitting in line attempting to leave Raleigh's Carter-Finley Stadium. My mother had a white-knuckled grip on the polished wooden steering wheel. I was riding shotgun, dressed head-to-toe in North Carolina State red and white. My little brother was in the backseat, donned in East Carolina purple and gold. He loved the Pirates because our father was an alum and had pitched for the East Carolina Teachers College baseball team back in the day. But I loved the Wolfpack because we were living in Raleigh in the Jimmy Valvano era and, did I mention it was 1983?

ECU had just defeated State for the first time in six years and did so by stopping the Pack on fourth down deep in Pirates territory in the waning seconds, preserving a 22-16 victory in front of 57,700 fans, at the time the largest crowd to ever witness a college football game in the state of North Carolina.

My brother was very happy. I was not. Mom, flying solo because Dad was away officiating another game in another town, had to physically separate us as we walked through the gravel parking lot to the car. Now we all watched as no one was bothering to separate a pair of bourbon-soaked gentlemen throwing hands in that same parking lot right beside our car. They were also dressed in opposing colors. When the guy in red had enough, he got back into his car and power-locked the doors. So the guy in purple walked around behind the car, ripped the license plate off with his bare hands and threw it like a frisbee into the dark pine trees that lined the lot.

"Just so you know, that's what you two looked like walking to the car," Mom said to us, our preteen faces still flushed. "If you're still doing that when you're their age, don't come home."

My brother mouthed silently at me from the backseat: "Go Pirates."

I responded in kind, perhaps even with a middle finger extended: "Go Pack."

Looking at East Carolina-NC State this weekend and thinking of all the Down East NC houses divided. Ex. Here's Dad pitching for ECU in the 1960s and me in my Wolfpack gear in the 1980s (holding a bass). pic.twitter.com/LRBKQEyySU

Army-Navy, the Iron Bowl, The Game, the Big Game and more Cups than you would find at a Bed Bath & Beyond going out of business sale. College football, far more any other sport, is built atop a foundation of rivalries. But while we as a helmeted nation tend to focus on the biggest brand-name showdowns -- the ones that determine conference titles, steer national championship pushes and have long held down prime network time slots on late November weekends -- they aren't always the most fun or even the most furiously fought football fracases on the calendar.

That's why my personal favorite rivalries are the ones that set fire to their particular corner of the map with a crazed college football intensity but are games that people who live outside that immediate area might not fully understand or appreciate.

The contests when towns, counties, particular pages of state atlases and individual homes are divided by laundry. When autumn Saturday evenings aren't just a football game, but rather a fistfight at a family reunion. And who doesn't want to watch that?

It's Akron and Kent State, stars of the Bottom 10 Cinematic Universe, located only 10 miles apart, who have a snafu in the snow every November over the possession of a Wagon Wheel. It's North Dakota State vs. South Dakota State, Bison vs. Jackrabbits, in a contest that almost always has huge FCS national title implications and also almost always ends with postgame finger-pointing that will last for the next 364 days. It's basically the entire Sun Belt Conference, where divisions still exist, teams still ride buses to games, bad blood has flowed through reluctantly shared veins of the likes of Georgia Southern vs. App State and where soon-to-be member Louisiana Tech is resuming the Rivalry in Dixie against Southern Miss. Football feuds that reach back through years gone by in lower divisions and long-abandoned small college conferences.

Central Michigan vs. Western Michigan for the Victory Cannon. Kansas vs. Missouri, a rivalry that next weekend will be reinstated as the Border Showdown, formerly called the Border War, a title with roots back to an actual border war between the two territories. Montana vs. Montana State in the Brawl of the Wild. Even the big brand likes of Clemson vs. Georgia, stadiums only 80 miles apart, and the game we just watched in Ireland to open the 2025 season, Iowa State vs. Kansas State, aka Farmageddon.

Why do I so relish these raucous regional rivalries? Because as you are now aware, I grew up right in the middle of one -- maybe the best example there is. East Carolina versus North Carolina State, who will meet for the 34th time Thursday at 7 p.m. ET on the ACC Network.

Will the nation be riveted? No. But will my neighborhood of that nation be hotter than a bottle of Texas Pete? Oh, hell yes.

"I call them cookout games because if there is ever an argument at the family cookout, then it's probably about a game like this one." That's how it was once explained to me by Ruffin McNeill, a Lumberton, North Carolina, native and former all-star ECU defender who became the coach at his alma mater in 2010 and led the Pirates to four bowls in six years before he was controversially dismissed. Now Ruff is a special assistant at ... wait for it ... NC State. "To me, it's what makes college football the best sport in the world. When you look at your brother or your cousin and you say, 'You know I love you, but for a few hours this weekend I'm not going to love you as much as I usually do.'"

That's how a lot of North Carolina families will be rolling Thursday night, especially those who reside between the state capital and the Outer Banks, what we call Down East. From Nags Head to New Bern and Scotland Neck to Smithfield, one giant barrel of red and white and purple and gold, all swirled together in the same living room. And man, do those colors clash.

"So, I'm from Texas, right? We have a lot of really intense rivalries that mean a lot inside the state of Texas but that people outside of Texas don't really understand," USC coach Lincoln Riley said earlier this year. He was East Carolina's offensive coordinator for five years, 2010 to 2014, coaching under McNeill. "When NC State came to our place in 2010, I remember in pregame, it was already so tense. I said, 'Oh man, this is how this is?' Ruff said, 'Yes, it is. Now imagine what it's going to be like when we go there. Buckle up.'"

BACK TO THE memory banks.

Jan. 1, 1992. The final Peach Bowl was played in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. It was a drizzly day, but that didn't prevent nearly 60,000 people from attending the last college football game played at the home of the Braves, soon to be replaced by the Georgia Dome. Both ECU and NC State were in the Top 25. After nearly two decades of annual contests, they hadn't played since 1987. Why? Because after another win in Raleigh, Pirates fans stormed NC State's home field and pillaged the goalposts. By this time Valvano was NCSU's athletic director and, angered by the damage done to his football stadium, he immediately discontinued the series. So, when it came time for the Peach Bowl to send out its invites, the powers-that-be wisely made phone calls to two schools located only 80 miles apart and only a day's drive down I-85 to their stadium.

There, in the stands, sitting with my family and surrounded by ECU fans, I began openly gloating about State's imminent victory. After all, the Pack led by 17 points with less than nine minutes remaining. It was over, right? Wrong. Pirates quarterback Jeff Blake, amid chants of "We ... believe!" and a sea of foam yellow buccaneer swords, orchestrated a comeback that made him not merely an East Carolina football legend, but the forever Pirates football deity.

I was so bitter about that day for so long that it pained me the first time I finally interviewed Blake, and he was such a genuinely nice guy.

"Everywhere I go, it's about the '92 Peach Bowl," he said to me for a 2014 story about bowl games. Blake threw for more than 21,000 yards over 14 NFL seasons and is now director of the IMG QB Academy in Florida. "If I had won a Super Bowl ring, it would still be second in [Greenville, NC] to people wanting to see my Peach Bowl watch. At a big school, those moments might not mean so much. For the rest of us, those are the moments."

ECU vs. NCSU has provided so many of those moments.

That game that Lincoln Riley spoke of in 2010 began with a 21-0 ECU lead in the first quarter, but Wolfpack QB Russell Wilson led a comeback of his own, sending the game into OT. But in that extra frame, Wilson was intercepted to secure the victory for the Pirates. It was a revenge game for their last meeting two years earlier, when it was NC State who celebrated at the end of the series' first-ever overtime contest.

In 2022, ECU had a chance to tie and win the game late but missed a PAT and field goal as time expired, preserving NCSU's 1-point win. And, oh yeah, there's their last meeting, only eight months ago in the Military Bowl, where a sellout crowd in Annapolis got a red-hot game and a bloody ref as the result of a fight at the end of the game, à la those drunk dudes in the parking lot in '83.

Speaking of, I failed to mention this when I shared that story, but those guys totally knew each other. They looked similar. Had the same nose. One even called the other by name. So, it should come as no surprise that the prize awarded for winning this game is directly based on that kind of kinship. The Victory Barrel, which wasn't introduced until 2007 but has been retroactively marked to represent every result since the series began in 1970, was rolled out with a backstory about two ultracompetitive brothers who grew up on an Eastern North Carolina farm but attended the two different schools. Eventually, they donated the pork barrel that they had once kept in a barn, whittled with the results of their own hometown competitions, for the schools to keep track of their football games.

"Those games are the ones where you look at the other guy and you know that guy, or you at least recognize that guy, because that guy either lives in your neighborhood, or hell, he might be your brother," explained Jerry Kill when asked about the intensity of overlooked rivalries. Now he's a special consultant at Vanderbilt. Prior to that, he was the coach at New Mexico State, one half of the Rio Grande Rivalry versus New Mexico, aka the Game When The Diego Pavia Logo Urination Video (ahem) Leaked, which holds its115th edition later this season. "If you like western movies, you know how it works. This town ain't big enough for the both of us."

North Carolina has never been big enough for all its college football teams. Tobacco Road has long belonged to what used to be called the Big Four. Beginning at the western edge of the middle region of the state, aka the Piedmont, with Wake Forest, then moving east into the Triangle, with Duke and UNC in the middle and NC State on the eastern flank. But as Appalachian State began to gather steam, it challenged from the mountains after East Carolina did the same from the coast. Both have always coveted the power conference ACC membership of the Big Four, but both have also proudly owned the little brother chip on their shoulder pads. All while Wake and State have done the same, as they've had to watch the nation become obsessed with the Blue Devils and Tar Heels during hoops season.

NC State head coach Dave Doeren, who made headlines this summer at ACC media days when asked about ECU and replied, "I want to beat the s--- out of that team," has never shied away from the perceived "haves vs. have-nots" syndrome when it comes to UNC. See: When he also made headlines in 2022 saying, as paraphrased by a TV crew, that NC State is blue collar and UNC is elitist. On the flipside, ECU coach Blake Harrell recently suggested that his entire roster was making less NIL money than Pack QB CJ Bailey.

"Whatever you need to motivate yourself, you do it," Torry Holt said, laughing, prior to his induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 2022. The former NC State All-America wide receiver grew up in Gibsonville, North Carolina, just off Tobacco Road. He even picked tobacco as a kid. He also went 1-1 versus East Carolina during his four years with the Pack, highlighted by a backbreaking 68-yard TD catch to open the second half in Raleigh in 1997 that paved the way to a 37-24 win. "The important thing for me is that the last time I played them, we won. We lost the first one. But you don't want to lose the last one. That was the last time I played them and the last time I will ever play them."

He laughed again. "So ... scoreboard."

ONE MORE FROM the memory bank. It's all you need to know about ECU vs. NCSU, and it easily applies to all those other underappreciated pigskin passion plays throughout this great college football nation.

It was spring 1997 and I was a young feature producer for ESPN. My primary beat was NASCAR, and I was covering a race at my hometown Rockingham Speedway. That's when the governor of North Governor, Jim Hunt, who was an NC State graduate and former NCSU student body president, wandered into the media center during a rain delay, making small talk. He said to us, "You guys are with ESPN? Well, I have a story for you. Our state legislature is introducing a bill to try and mandate that East Carolina plays State every year. Y'all ever been to one of those games?"

I told him that, yes, I had, growing up in Raleigh in the 1980s. My camera operator said he had been a Wolfpack athlete, a swimmer. What we know now is that the bill never passed, but it did lead to more frequent Tobacco Road bookings for the Pirates.

That '97 day in rainy Rockingham, Hunt sighed. "If that bill passes, then y'all know what I'm going to have to do?"

We looked at the governor, quizzically. He winked. Then he joked. At least I think it was a joke.

"We're going to need to hire a lot more state troopers for Down East. Or wrestling referees."