Pack Land Big OT From Charlotte

'07 Football General NCS Football50

Charlotte Olympic offensive tackle Andrew Wallace has committed to N.C. State University, Olympic Athletics Director Ken Konstaney confirmed to WRAL Friday.

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'07 Football General NCS Football

50 Responses to Pack Land Big OT From Charlotte

  1. noah 08/27/2007 at 1:58 PM #

    Laureano and Dukes both came after the period I was describing (very late 80s and very early 90s). By the time both came to prominence, we were already paying the price for our recruiting failures…and more specifically, for the rash of broken legs and arrests that seemed to show up every day after the 1994 season.

    Badger – don’t remember a lineman named Wendell Moore. Was this for NC State?

  2. beowolf 08/27/2007 at 2:00 PM #

    If the term is “snakebit,” the answer most definitely is “Wolfpack athletics in the 1990s.”

  3. Dr. BadgerPack 08/27/2007 at 2:09 PM #

    Noah-

    Yes, this was NC State. I TA’d a freshman class he took while I was an undergraduate there (F97, 98 or S99– TA’d 4 semesters, not sure which one he fell in). I’m sure he was buried in the depth chart as a frosh. I never heard anything about him after I graduated, but have always been curious as the thing that stood out was he was a fantastic student. Complete blew my preconceived notions about athletes in general out of the water.

    I am certain the first name was Wendell… it is possible the last name could have been Bryant.

  4. noah 08/27/2007 at 2:38 PM #

    I don’t remember a player by that name.

    We had a guy during that period named Jermaine Wilkerson. His first cousin was Dan “Big Daddy” Wilkerson.

    He never played a single down for us…but he was a great student. Something like a triple major with one of them being molecular biology. I’m sure he’s a doctor by now.

  5. Dr. BadgerPack 08/27/2007 at 3:20 PM #

    Guess my student was REALLY buried on the depth chart.

    Thanks for accessing the old memory bank though!

    At one point I did work with a kicker that actually saw PT. A few years later I recall watching a game and thinking “maybe we could have won if I had just flunked the kid”… Not that he deserved flunking at the time he took the class, I just like wins.

  6. Mike 08/27/2007 at 4:48 PM #

    Oh yeah Jay Dukes – should have known not to recruit a kid named Dukes. Only thing worse would be a name of Tarhole. Speaking of Dukes, how about another prized recruit named Dukes – Elijah. Hated to see him not show up then but gald now. Of course, as Noah knows, he probably never intended to enroll anyway.

  7. lush 08/27/2007 at 4:55 PM #

    loreauno was a criminal?? i thought he just sucked, what did he do? i was happy to see him get benched for jaime barnette.

  8. noah 08/27/2007 at 7:43 PM #

    Laureano was involved in the assault on a police officer, I believe.

    That was the year the season started with Hurricane Fran. Georgia Tech beat us the next day. Laureano was awful to start the year. His mom ended up having to move to Raleigh to get him to go to class and he admitted that he had never watched game tape before that year.

    He got benched at halftime of the Baylor game and Jamie Barnette showed a little bit. Laureano came back the next game and then got thrown off the team for good when he got arrested.

    Barnette ended up starting (and doing fairly well) against Alabama. The funny thing was that Barnette was recruited as a safety. He showed up and ran a 4.8-40 and O’Cain said he turned to the coach that recruited Barnette and said, “You better hope this guy can throw!”

    Laureano did well at Fla. A&M actually. That was about the right level for him.

    No news was usually good news during the O’Cain era. It meant that Chris McNeil and Brian Brooks weren’t getting arrested on Hillsborough Street for stealing car radios. It meant that seven football players weren’t breaking into apartments (the wrong one, it turned out) and trashing the place. It meant that Carl Reeves wasn’t breaking his leg and Darwin Walker wasn’t transferring and it meant that his players weren’t involved in shooting rampaging drunks.

  9. redfred2 08/27/2007 at 9:32 PM #

    Whoa! And all of this time they had me convinced that selling a pair tennis shoes was a cardinal sin. Oh well, we weren’t ever that good in football anyway, so I guess they figured why bother.

  10. choppack1 08/27/2007 at 9:38 PM #

    I thought McNeil and Brooks were charged for B&E for cars in that movie theater near Carter Finley…I think that McNeil ended up actually being conference player of the year at A&T.

  11. noah 08/27/2007 at 9:48 PM #

    You might be right about the location.

    McNeil was more than conference player of the year, he was the national player of the year for that level. He had something like 26 sacks as a senior. Everyone who saw him said you could tell he didn’t belong there.

    He would have helped immensely at DE. When you hear his backstory, his downfall became even more heartbreaking.

  12. SixPack 08/28/2007 at 10:07 AM #

    Another one for the books :

    Percy Morman, Danville VA. He was a highly touted option QB.
    He got slammed with a date rape charge (conviction ?) during his freshman year……

    He left STATE and played at some JC after that (can’t remember if he did any time in the cooler !).

  13. SixPack 08/28/2007 at 10:16 AM #

    Aha……..just thought of another QB wash-out……….
    John Eisley.

    He was a big guy like Stone (6’6″, 250+) and highly touted out of HS.

    Unfortunately he was ultimately as bad a Stone or worse. He went from QB to, I believe, tight end and ultimately (believe it or not) defensive tackle (albeit..with not a lot of success !).

    NOAH…….your assignment should be to do a compilation of all STATE’s QB’s in modern times (to include their fate in or out of the program !).

  14. noah 08/28/2007 at 11:19 AM #

    Mormon was under Tom Reed. I think that was 1984.

    Mormon probably would have never played QB for us. He went to prison and when he got out, he enrolled at Bowling Green and was a WR. He did very well there and was being looked at as a guy who might end up getting drafted.

    However, leopards don’t change their spots. Mormon made fools of all of his defenders who claimed his innocence by getting arrested and convicted two more times of doing exactly the same thing (refusing to take “no” for an answer).

    SixPack – I’m reasonably certain I could go back to Tim Espisito. I remember when he and Joe McIntosh were hailed as a formidable 1-2 punch and a couple of folks said that we might end up surprising people. We had a really good tackle named Joe Millinicek (who played for the Rams for awhile).

    This was 1984, I think. Clemson was on probation and was down (and would be even worse the next year). We beat up on Ohio and then both Furman (led by Dick Sheridan) and WFU beat us. We rebounded by beating ECU and a ranked Georgia Tech team (easily the biggest win of the Tom Reed era) on the road. So we’re 3-2…and of course, we lost the next six games. We actually had the lead on Clemson late in the game, but several INTs took care of that.

    The low point was losing to UVa by about seven touchdowns. I think this was the game where in the locker room afterwards, Tom Reed was LITERALLY too angry to talk. He just sort of stammered for a little while and then had to excuse himself. He couldn’t form words, he was so upset.

    I’d love to interview Reed, if he’d be up for it. He’s one of those career football guys whose completely insane about the sport. He carved out a fairly successful career as an assistant, working at Michigan and in the NFL. If you guys are watching the HBO show, “Hard Knocks,” the Chiefs have a def. line coach who reminds me of Reed. He’s completely hoarse from screaming all the time and he’s like some sort of caged animal that they let out just for practice.

    Reed was like that. He’d go completely nuts and none of his assistants could reel him back in. The head coach has to stay reasonably centered. His assistants can be lunatics, but the head coach has to know when to step in and wipe noses and hug the players (who’ve been reduced to goo).

    I attended a WPC jamboree with my father shortly after Sheridan and his assistants got to Raleigh. Before the meeting, I was wandering around and came across one of the assistants talking to a small group of men. I was eavesdropping and someone asked the guy what the biggest surprise had been so far. The coach (I *think* it was Joe Pate) said taht the entire staff was rather shocked by the emotional state of our players. They’d go to correct a mistake and the players would cringe and shrink away, like whipped puppies. He said that they had to spend spring practice just encouraging the players and getting them emotionally ready for the season.

    That summer, both Bobby Crumpler and Haywood Jeffires confirmed the story. Both of them had been moved to linebacker by Reed’s folks and both were considering quitting football. Jeffires said after practice he’d usually just go back to his dorm room and cry. Sheridan had given everyone a chance to move and players were diving left and right back to their old positions…so not only were guys back where they truly belonged, they were a lot happier.

    That was a big reason for our fast turnaround.

  15. noah 08/28/2007 at 11:30 AM #

    BTW, I meant to mention one other thing. I vaguely remember Tol Avery being our QB at the start of the 80s. I remember going to games with my folks and people screaming the worst sorts of things at him.

    I was about seven or eight and I didn’t understand why people were so angry with him. We weren’t very good, but it didn’t seem like it was entirely Avery’s fault. He’d make a nice throw that would get dropped and nine people would stand up in front of me and call him names I won’t repeat and express serious doubts that his parents were ever married.

    I asked my dad why people were so mad at him and I remember him getting this rather conflicted look on his face. I think a part of him wanted to say, “Because they’re a bunch of redneck, bigoted a-holes,” and another part didn’t really think that this was the time or the place to go into the state of race relations in terms of black quarterbacks. (to his credit, he explained it to me later.)

    A decade later, Avery’s name would surface and I swear, by the reactions people would have, you’d have thought that the guy lost every single game he ever played, raped the cheerleaders before the game, verbally assaulted little children and sprayed half the crowd with the ebola virus.

    I went and looked up his stats to double-check whether or not I was forgetting something. Nope, he wasn’t THAT bad. We were a pretty crappy football team…even when we were going 6-5 under Monty Kiffin. We were beating terrible teams and getting creamed by anyone with a speck of talent. The ACC was an awful football conference. All the talent and optimism that Holtz had brought with him was lost at sea in the cargo hold of Bo Rein’s plane.

    Avery was just a suitable target for a lot of folks. Tol Avery went and played in the CFL for about a decade and did fairly well.

  16. BJD95 08/28/2007 at 11:49 AM #

    My early childhood memory of Tol Avery was that he fumbled the snap ALOT. That’s the kind of thing that can turn folks against you quickly.

    That said, I’m sure that race was an issue for some folks.

    Great Tom Reed story. What kind of a freaking psycho do you have to be that one could get a D-1 football player to ADMIT to people that his cach made him cry like that?

  17. TNCSU 08/28/2007 at 11:59 AM #

    Noah,
    Great stuff! I remember the Percy Mormon story – it was my freshman year, and I remember it clearly – actually had met the accuser. I had NO idea what happened to him afterwards – amazing that he repeated the same offense.

    On a different note – has anyone got any scoop on basketball recruiting? I think we’re still in the hunt for an ’08 big, but none are listed. Also, any ideas about ’09 recruits? Primacyone, you usually have some scoop, so let’s hear it!

  18. packgrad93 08/28/2007 at 1:56 PM #

    ’08 – don’t know, need a big to replace JJ & Ben unless we expect a top big in ’09 …

    ’09 – could be huge:

    Favors – 6’9″ C 5* offered
    Johnson – 6’5″ SG/SF 5* offered
    Hamilton – 6’7″ SF 5* offered
    Wall – PG 5* offered (in raleigh)
    Howell – 6’7″ PF 4*
    Kelly – 6’9″ PF offered (in raleigh)
    Hibbert – 6’4″ G 4*

  19. RickJ 08/28/2007 at 2:19 PM #

    “My early childhood memory of Tol Avery was that he fumbled the snap ALOT. That’s the kind of thing that can turn folks against you quickly.”

    BJD85 – Halloween, October 31, 1981 – NC State at South Carolina on regional TV. This is probably what is scarring your memory. We lost 20 – 12 and Avery fumbled at least 6 or 7 snaps from center. Never seen anything like it before or since.

  20. Mike 08/28/2007 at 4:38 PM #

    Tol Avery, there is another blast from the past. My recollection of Avery was he had a great arm. He would throw it 70 yards – and the receiver would only run 30. So what if it was imcomplete, look how far he threw it and the pretty spiral. The other thing about Avery was he had no touch. So on the little swing pass, he would throw it like Nolan Ryan and no one could catch it. I was young as well so dont have complete memory, but that is my recollection.

  21. Mike 08/28/2007 at 4:53 PM #

    And while speaking of past QB’s, one of my (and anyone in red/white) has to be Johnny Evans. He was the 1st I remember (I know Gabriel from the NFL but not NCSU).

    Evans, Avery, Scott Smith, Esposito (may have missed one in there), Erik Kramer, Preston Poag, Geoff Bender, Terry Jordan, Terry Harvey, Jamie Barnette, Philip, Jay Davis, Marcus Stone, and now Evans jr. Who am I missing here?

  22. noah 08/28/2007 at 8:27 PM #

    Kramer>Shane Montgomery (87)>Davenport/Montgomery (88)>Jordan>Bender>Harvey….

    Terry Harvey is a guy whose numbers are pretty poor. A lot of people remember him fondly because he played on (mostly) good teams, but he’s got a poor career completion percentage and threw more INTs than TDs (I think). I think he also holds the record for most # of picks in a single game.

  23. BJD95 08/29/2007 at 10:53 AM #

    RickJ – YES. That murky memory did involve a televised game against the Gamecocks.

  24. Mike 08/29/2007 at 11:51 PM #

    Thanks Noah, great memory. How could I forget Shane? What an idiot I am. Was in many classes with him – I knew I was leaving someone out but just drew a complete blank. And Davenport – what an athlete that guy was. Played pick up bball with him in old Carmichael. Always thought he would have made a great receiver in the pros.

  25. noah 08/30/2007 at 11:11 AM #

    He was a little slow to be much of a WR. He was with the Steelers for a couple of years, but it’s tough for a guy with 4.6 or 4.7 speed to make it at that position.

    You have to be the best route runner in the world (Steve Largent and Jerry Rice) and catch everything thrown anywhere near you to last.

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