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Giving the rivalry its due

Posted on November 18, 2010November 18, 2010 by Staff


By Eddy Landreth
Staff Writer

Butch Davis is a smart man, but there is one thing he’s taken too much time to absorb.

The North Carolina-N.C. State football game is not just another game, not just another Saturday in the season. This is the annual civil war in football in North Carolina, with the majority of the rosters on both teams pulled from all corners of the state.

“Coach Davis doesn’t put one team above the other, and these guys have us circled all year,” senior safety Deunta Williams said. “When we step out on the field, I think the players have to take it more personally.”

This is the final game at Kenan Stadium for the seniors.

“It bothers me personally,” Williams said. “When I first started getting recruited, N.C. State was one of my top picks. So it’s a little bit personal for us.

“All I care about is beating them,” Williams said. “That would be the first time [during Williams’ career], on Saturday. It’s going to be our last time playing at Kenan Stadium. There are going to be a lot of emotional feelings.”

One cannot talk about this game without including the alumni bases. They comprise, far and away, the majority of the collegiate sports fans in the state. Sure, there are a lot of Duke basketball fans in Durham; but the farther one gets from those city limits, the more it becomes about the Wolfpack and Tar Heels.

Alumni from these two schools work together in every part of the state, attend church together and even intermarry. And there is one fact that simply cannot be disputed – under Davis, this game has meant more to the Wolfpack than it has to Carolina.

Davis even made the same old mistake last Saturday by calling it another game on the schedule. This is not another game on the schedule, certainly not for anyone who plays, coaches or roots for the Wolfpack.

When Mack Brown first came to North Carolina, his first few teams did not have the personnel to compete with the Wolfpack. But as he began to recruit better players, it still took him some time to understand that the game against N.C. State carried an intensity that would be matched by few opponents in any given year. Once Brown grasped this fact, UNC did not lose another game to the Wolfpack under him.

This was one of the few bright spots under John Bunting. As an alumnus, Bunting had a fierce dislike for N.C. State and he managed to translate that to his team more often than not.

Maybe after saying what he did following Carolina’s ugly loss to Virginia Tech, Davis had some second thoughts. He certainly seemed to when he addressed the media this week.

“It’s obviously going to carry an enormous amount of magnitude,” Davis said. “You want to win this game for a multitude of reasons. Everybody associated with this program wants to win this game very badly.”

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