Even though it is ACC Tournament week, we thought that we shouldn’t lose sight of the football program in light of a nice piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch this weekend.
This article focuses on Tom O’Brien and NC State football.
O’Brien sat down for an interview in which he marveled at the passion and enthusiasm of Wolfpack fans.
“What it means to be part of the program at State has been tremendous,” he said.
He’s not in a pro town anymore, and that’s part of what made the State job so appealing to O’Brien. For better or worse, the Wolfpack is big news in Raleigh and many parts of North Carolina.
In Boston, he noted, no matter how much BC wins, “you’re never going to be the Red Sox, you’re never going to be the Patriots. I don’t know if you’ll be the Celtics or the Bruins. That’s a fact of life.”
O’Brien said he missed the excitement that comes from college rivalries.
“I grew up playing Army-Navy, coaching Army-Navy, coaching Virginia-Virginia Tech,” he said. “Then you went to Boston, and there was nothing. We tried to make Notre Dame our rival, but they didn’t want to have a rivalry with us.”
He has a rival now, of course – that “other school” over in Chapel Hill. If O’Brien had any doubts that State could compete with North Carolina and the rest of the ACC, they vanished Sept. 23, when BC played in Raleigh.
Since he’d last seen Carter-Finley Stadium 11 years earlier, State had made “mind-boggling” improvements to its facilities, O’Brien recalled. And the raucous atmosphere that night, when the Wolfpack rallied to beat the Eagles 17-15, floored him.
“I go back to the passion and the enthusiasm [that State fans] have for their program,” O’Brien said. “When we walked out of there, even my wife said, ‘Boy, what happened to this place? It wasn’t the cow pasture we were in 11 years ago.'”
