The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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50 ■ THE WOLFPACKER His Record May Be About To Fall, But Earle Edwards' Legacy Lives On Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu. PACK PERSPECTIVE BY TIM PEELER S ometime in October, if all goes as predicted, Dave Doeren will become the NC State football pro- gram's career leader in coaching victories, surpassing the record set by Earle Edwards from 1954-70. That milestone may garner a sliver of attention for Doeren dur- ing a season in which Dabo Swin- ney is set to surpass Frank How- ard's mark of 165 wins at Clemson and Mack Brown will assuredly earn his 100th win at North Caro- lina. On the surface, the 77-88 record Edwards established during his 17 seasons at the helm of a fairly tradition-less program might seem somewhat underwhelming. It is not. Only one ACC school, Boston College, has an all-time win- ningest head coach with fewer than 77 victories (former NC State head coach Tom O'Brien with 75). Before Edwards falls to second on the NC State list, let's take a few moments to appreciate just how hard-fought those 77 victories were for someone who never held another head coaching position yet made his record stand for more than 50 years. Just before Edwards arrived in Raleigh in 1954, school chancellor Carey Bostian wanted to end football. That would've meant the Wolfpack would have been ex- cluded from joining six other schools in breaking away from their Southern Con- ference affiliation to form a new league called the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953. The school promised to put just as much effort into being successful in foot- ball as the men's basketball team had been under Everett Case. Horace Hendrickson was replaced by Edwards in 1954, a curious choice for a school desperate for a proven leader on the gridiron. A Penn State-trained industrial engi- neer from Greensburg, Pa., Edwards took a job at his alma mater after two years with a private engineering firm. He spent 13 seasons with the Nittany Lions before joining head coach Duffy Daugherty's staff at Michigan State, arriving just in time to help lead the Spartans to the 1952 national championship. After the 1953 season, at the age of 45, Edwards decided to seek a job as a head coach. He had three options: Marquette, NC State or a position in the Canadian Football League. He picked the Wolfpack, and the wisdom of that choice became evident in 1960 when Marquette dropped its football program. State didn't exactly have a history of success, having been through three coaches from 1937-53 with only five win- ning seasons. Edwards had only three as- sistant coaches and 13 scholarships for his inaugural team in 1954. He didn't win his first ACC game until the opener of his third season. "It was discouraging at first," Edwards told writer Bruce Phillips. "We started from scratch. We were able to add three scholarships in August of our first year and a few partials. There wasn't any money. It was some few years before we could afford to fly recruits in." Still, he and his three assistants built a program by relying on their Northeast- ern roots. Edwards recruited eastern and western Pennsylvania and North Caro- lina. He uncovered some hidden talent in his first recruiting class in run- ning backs Dick Christy and Dick Hunter, and went on to develop a pipeline that kept his program well stocked from the steel towns up north and the tobacco farms of North Carolina. In all, Edwards won three out- right ACC titles (1957, '64 and '68), shared two more (1963 and '65) and finished second three times in the eight-team league (1960, '66 and '67). He achieved the school's highest ranking (No. 3 in 1967) and won its first bowl game (over Geor- gia in the 1967 Liberty Bowl). Edwards was named ACC Coach of the Year four times, but the real trophy for his career success will always be Carter-Finley Stadium, which he helped finance by taking his team on the road to places like Laramie, Wyo., and Hattiesburg, Miss., and scheduling road games against national powers like UCLA, Nebraska, Penn State, Alabama, Iowa and Michigan State. From the 1957 through 1965 sea- sons, excluding one bowl game, NC State played 36 home games and 54 games away from Raleigh. In return, he was able to bring in some nationally prominent teams like Penn State, Florida and Houston once his dream home field was finally realized in the final five years of his tenure. Those games did not do much for his coach- ing record but helped pay for the origi- nal concrete structure that remains as Carter-Finley's solid foundation. Edwards abruptly retired just before the 1971 season, turning his program over to longtime assistant Al Michaels as a one-year interim. Lou Holtz followed, as did the exponential growth in success and expectations of the program. There have been ups and downs since then, but until now no one from Holtz to Bo Rein to Dick Sheridan to Chuck Amato to O'Brien has seriously chal- lenged Edwards' mark for victories or overcome more for building sustained success until Doeren's chase over the past 11 years. ■ Earle Edwards won 77 games during his tenure as head coach at NC State, the most in school history. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE ATHLETICS