Program Spotlight: Earle Edwards
Editor’s note: Fifty years ago, NC State accomplished the unthinkable, winning its first ACC Championship under the guidance of fourth-year head coach Earle Edwards. With an offensive backfield that featured undersized backs Dick Christy and Dick Hunter, the Wolfpack had a reliable offense and a spectacular defense, which recorded five shutouts in 10 games. Throughout the season, we will remember the 1957 ACC Champions as they celebrate the 50th anniversary of their remarkable and unexpected championship.By Tim PeelerEarle Edwards did not come to NC State to win championships. He just wanted a chance, after years of toiling as an assistant coach under Biggie Munn at Michigan State and Bob Higgins at Penn State, to run his own program.
The Huntington, Pa., native thought he might succeed either of those coaches when they retired, but bigger names got in the way of the soft-spoken Edwards. When Munn announced just prior to the 1954 Rose Bowl that he was stepping down as head coach to concentrate on his job as athletics director, he elevated Munn to head coach. At the age of 45, Edwards decided he needed to strike out on his own.
In the late winter of 1954, Edwards was down to three coaching options: the head coaching job at Marquette, a school that was perpetually on the verge of disbanding its football program; an advisor’s position in the yet-to-be-created Canadian Football League; or head coach at NC State, a school that had almost been left out of the newly formed Atlantic Coast Conference because of its lack of football success.
At least Marquette had a newer stadium. What NC State had was decrepit Riddick Stadium, with an open-air press box, a jumble of mix-and-match aluminum bleachers and an endzone fieldhouse so small that the Wolfpack football team chose to use its lockerroom in the basement of Reynolds Coliseum, just so the team would have enough space to put on its shoulder pads and leather helmets. NC State was perpetually bad in football, despite the efforts of a slew of coaches hired to make things better without a firm financial commitment to the program.
But Edwards, who had helped Penn State go undefeated in 1947 and was a member of the Spartan coaching staff when Michigan State on the 1952 national championship, thought he could succeed at NC State. A scrawny end as a player for the Nittany Lions he once said “As a coach, I wouldn’t have given myself a scholarship” Edwards was a bright student of the game of football and an accomplished builder. He earned a degree in industrial engineering and worked for two years as an engineer before he became a high school coach. It was the right combination for success in Raleigh.
Prior to Edwards’ arrival, the Wolfpack had only one winning record in its previous six seasons. Edwards didn’t do much better in his early efforts as a head coach, winning exactly two games in the fledgling ACC in his first three years on the job.
“It was discouraging at first,” Edwards remembered to Bruce Phillips of the Raleigh Times. “We started from scratch. We had 13 scholarships that first year. We added three more in late August and we had a few partials. But there just wasn’t any money. It was years before we could afford to fly recruits in. It was awfully hard for us to interest players here in the state, so we had to go outside.”
Edwards had four assistant coaches: backfield coach Al Michaels, line coach Carey Brewbaker, receivers coach Pat Peppler and freshman coach Bill Smaltz. Like Edwards, Michaels and Smaltz were Penn State graduates who had close ties to their home state. After four years on the job, the staff had attracted 35 of the Wolfpack’s 59-player roster from Pennsylvania.
They became the foundation of Edwards’ most impressive achievement taking over a program with hardly any financial backing and turning out five ACC Championships, beginning with the improbable season of 1957. The Wolfpack was picked to finish last in the league that season, despite a veteran lineup that included Dick Christy and Dick Hunter in the offensive and defensive backfields.
The Wolfpack’s schedule was brutal, as always. Early in his tenure at Raleigh, Edwards decided he would play more games on the road than at Riddick Stadium, knowing he could earn sizable guarantees for the athletics department for his willingness to go on the road. The 1957 season began with five consecutive road games: at North Carolina, at Maryland, at Clemson, at Florida State and at Miami.
The Wolfpack won four of those by a combined scored of 75-20 and dueled the Hurricanes to a scoreless tie on a Friday night in Miami, thanks in great part to a goal-line stand with less than a minute to play.
When Edwards and his team finally made its 1957 Riddick Stadium debut on Oct. 26, it faced perennial national power Duke, a team NC State had not beaten in 10 years. The 21,000-seat stadium was sold out for the first time since 1946 to see the No. 11 Wolfpack take on the Blue Devils. Duke scored two quick touchdowns, the first time all season that the Wolfpack trailed in a game. But Christy scored on a 52-yard pass from Tom Katich at the end of the first half and on a five-yard pass from Hunter in the third quarter, following Jim Oddo’s 53-yard interception return. The game ended in a 14-14 tie, but Edwards and company gained another measure of success by entering the top 10 of the Associated Press and United Press International for the first time in school history.
Two weeks later, after whipping winless Wake Forest, the Wolfpack suffered its lone setback of the season when it lost 7-6 to William & Mary, which entered the game as a 19-point underdog. The following week, the Wolfpack went to Roanoke, Va., to beat Virginia Tech 12-0, in yet another shutout.
Christy saved his best performance for the last game of his career. The Wolfpack went to Columbia, S.C., on Nov. 23, 1957, with a slim chance of winning its first league title since 1927, went All-America Jack McDowall led the school to its only Southern Conference championship. But North Carolina upset Duke in Chapel Hill that afternoon, and Christy scored all 29 of the Wolfpack’s points to defeat the Gamecocks, including a 44-yard field goal after time had expired.
That was the end of the season, however. Because of recruiting violations in Everett Case’s basketball program, the school was in the middle of a five-year NCAA probation that banned post-season play for all NC State sports. Duke represented the ACC in the Orange Bowl, denying the Wolfpack its only chance to play in a traditional New Year’s Day bowl game.
But Edwards’ program established its foundation that season, and he went on to win four more league title over the next 12 years. He continued to play nearly two-thirds of his games on the road to boost the athletic department revenues, until 1966 when the school opened Carter Stadium next to the NC State Fairgrounds. In 1967, Edwards guided the Wolfpack to its most accomplished season, even though the Wolfpack failed to win the ACC title that year. Still, it knocked off No. 2 Houston, was ranked as high as No. 3 in the nation and won the first bowl game in school history by defeating Georgia in the Liberty Bowl.
Opening the stadium and earning a post-season win ranked among the crowning achievements of Edwards career, almost as high as the 93 percent graduation rate of his players. In addition to Christy, Edwards coached All-Americas Roman Gabriel, Dennis Byrd, Freddie Combs, Gerald Warren, Ron Carpenter and Cary Metts.
Edwards wasn’t a particularly colorful character, though former player and assistant coach Greg Williams insists that the coach’s dry sense of humor was “funny as hell.” Neither he nor any member of his long-standing coaching staff ever uttered a profanity at least within earshot of their players.
“Coach Edwards wasn’t one that screamed or yelled or hollered, but if you got called into his office, your [butt] was in trouble and you knew it,” said Chuck Amato, who played for Edwards in the 1960s and oversaw the first improvements to Edwards’ beloved Carter Stadium in 35 years when Amato was named NC State’s head coach in 2000. “I was in trouble too often, and he always intimidated me. If you messed up, you were punished.”
Edwards made sure his players also matured into gentlemen. Gabriel still remembers the etiquette classes the coach made his players take before the first road game of every season, so the players wouldn’t embarrass themselves with bad table manners during pre-game meals.
In his career, Edwards won more games than any coach in NC State history (77) and served longer than any coach at a North Carolina Division I school (17 years). When he stepped down quite unexpectedly on June 25, 1971, Edwards said modestly: “I promised no miracles when I accepted this job, and I have kept my promise.”
But that was not true: Edwards’ achievements, beginning with the surprise ACC Championship he won 50 years ago, were a true miracle for NC State football.
Upon his death at the age of 89 on Feb. 25, 1997, Edwards was cremated and his ashes were spread on the field at Carter-Finley Stadium, a fitting tribute to the man whose life’s work was to nourish the roots of NC State’s football program.
Tim Peeler is the managing editor of GoPack.com. He can be reached at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.