TIM PEELER: Peebles Recalls 'The Catch,' 20 years later
11/1/2006 12:00:00 AM | Football
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH Trotting onto the field, he thought to himself: “This is a total waste of time. This is never going to work.” The “Hail Mary” was neither part of the playbook nor something the 1986 edition of NC State’s football team worked on in practice.
Essentially, it was a play, “trips right, ” that had been drawn up on the sidelines while officials sorted out a confusing and controversial mess on the field.
Running down the sidelines, he was looking for his teammate, the tall guy who was supposed to lead the way and tap the ball up into the air in case there was a pile-up in the end zone. He was nowhere to be seen.
After making his cut, he looked up and saw a perfectly spiraling pass and no one around him. “Am I the only one who sees this ball coming at me? I thought there would be a pile of people around.”
Twenty years ago today, track star/wide receiver Danny Peebles became an NC State football legend, because he out-jumped and out-bumped South Carolina safety Chris Major for a game-winning touchdown pass after time had expired on the clock, continuing Dick Sheridan's exciting inaugural season with a 23-22 victory over the Gamecocks..
To this day, Peebles can’t mention his name to a Wolfpack fan without hearing exactly where that fan was when he caught the pass. And, so far, he’s run into enough people who said they were at Carter-Finley Stadium that sunny afternoon to fill it a couple of times over.
“I think our stadium has grown to the size of Michigan’s over the last 20 years,” said Peebles, laughing.
Well, there has been significant expansion since those days: the grassy bank, which was the best vantage point for seeing Peebles’ remarkable grab, is no longer there, replaced with a new grandstands and the Murphy Center.
But let the record state that only 50,230 spectators some 8,500 of them Gamecock fans were in Carter-Finley that day. Most of them sat in stunned silence immediately after Peebles made the catch, but bedlam ensued afterwards.
“It couldn’t have been much more dramatic, that’s for sure,” said Sheridan, who stepped down as NC State’s football coach for health reasons in the summer of 1993 and now lives in Surfside Beach, S.C. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
For those with fuzzy memories, or newcomers to Wolfpack football, here’s what happened in that 12:15 contest between two old rivals on that afternoon two decades ago:
NC State jumped out to a quick 17-0 lead, turning three interceptions by South Carolina freshman sensation quarterback Todd Ellis into a pair of touchdowns and a field goal. The Wolfpack offense went dormant after that, particularly after senior quarterback Erik Kramer suffered an ankle injury early in the third quarter, giving way on one series to freshman Cam Young.
Ellis, a Greensboro native who had played at Page High School with NC State receiver Haywood Jeffires and safety Michael Brooks, began to click in the Gamecocks’ “run-and-shoot” offense. His one-yard plunge on the first play of the fourth quarter gave coach Joe Morrison’s team a 22-17 advantage.
The Wolfpack had two ineffective offensive possessions after that, and it appeared that the miracles of Dick Sheridan’s first season as head coach might finally come to an end.
Sheridan had led the Wolfpack to a 5-1-1 record in his first seven games, with a thrilling come-from-behind effort to force a tie with nationally ranked Pittsburgh and last-minute wins over rivals Wake Forest and North Carolina. Peebles, in fact, was the hero of the Wake game, catching the go-ahead touchdown pass with just 27 seconds remaining in the game.
A 27-3 victory over Clemson on national television the week before had put the Wolfpack in position to contend for its first ACC title since 1979, but the contest against South Carolina was important to gain even more national respect. Plus, the rivalry was pretty heated at the time, mainly because Kramer and Jeffires had hooked up on a game-winning touchdown the year before in Columbia, S.C., one of the few bright spots during three consecutive 3-8 seasons before Sheridan’s arrival.
There was also the long-standing rivalry that dated back to South Carolina’s membership in the ACC, and the game 29 years before when NC State halfback Dick Christy scored all of the Wolfpack’s points in a 29-26 victory in Columbia that secured State’s first ACC title.
And, 20 years before, on Oct. 8, 1966, South Carolina came to Raleigh to play the first game in Carter-Finley Stadium, and beat the Wolfpack 31-21 in the new stadium’s inaugural game.
So there was a lot of jawing back and forth on the field that day, a good bit of it led by Morrison, the late coach who had led the Gamecocks to its best finish (10-2) in school history two years before. Morrison was upset at how ACC-assigned clock-keeper Larry Honeycutt did his job on the Gamecocks’ final possess.
Here’s what happened: With 2:13 remaining, the Gamecocks seemingly secured the win by converting a third-and-12 from their own 15-yard line with a 23-yard pass from Ellis to Ryan Bethea. State was forced to use its final timeout with 2:13 remaining. But on a 2-yard loss on first down, the clock inexplicably stopped, bringing Morrison storming onto the field.
After the mess was settled, Ellis took a knee on the next two plays, trying to kill the clock. But South Carolina punter Scott Bame, in the face of an 11-man Wolfpack rush, shanked his punt only 15 yards, giving State the ball on the South Carolina 39-yard line with 27 seconds to play.
Kramer, playing on the gimpy ankle, couldn’t complete either of his first two passes on the possession, though he did get the benefit of a first down and five yards on a South Carolina defensive holding penalty.
On third down, Kramer was sacked by South Carolina defensive tackle Derek Frazier, and the Wolfpack scrambled to line up for a final play. As time expired, South Carolina linebacker Kenneth Robinson reached over center Chuck Massaro and grabbed Kramer by the jersey, taunting the Wolfpack quarterback about the Gamecock’s payback.
As South Carolina players, coaches and fans stormed the field, an official signaled that South Carolina had been offside on the play and State got the benefit of one more play.
While officials cleared the field, Kramer and his offense wandered over to the sidelines to get a play from the coaching staff.
They called it “trips right,” with Peebles, Jeffires and running back Frank Harris running fly patterns to the right corner of the south end zone.
Kramer was rushed and hit hard just as he released the ball, and he never saw the result of his desperation fling. He was carried off the field on the back of assistant coach Robbie Caldwell and taken immediately to Rex Hospital for X-rays.
Peebles, a Raleigh native and member of the 1985 4 X 100 relay team that won a NCAA championship in track, saw every second of its flight, from the time it left Kramer’s hands until it went through USC safety Chris Majors’ arms, right into Peebles’ chest.
Ever since, South Carolina players and fans have said that (A) Peebles pushed off on the infamous -- to them -- play and (B) a mysterious flag was thrown then picked up in the end zone.
“What happened was, at the time I was about to jump, one of the South Carolina guys was right there with me,” remembers Peebles, a regional sales representative for a technology company in Raleigh and a co-minister of Wakefield Family Church with former teammate Rodney Frazier. “I was jumping forwards and he was jumping backwards. I was the first one to leave the ground, I do know that. He jumped at a 45-degree angle behind me. We collided, for sure. I just knew that I had the ball.
“South Carolina said they threw a flag, but I never saw one. From that moment on, it was bedlam.”
The win was costly, however. Kramer couldn’t start the next week at Virginia, and the Wolfpack lost 20-16. Though Peebles did have another chance to catch a last-second pass from backup quarterback Cam Young.
“As I was running down the field, I was thinking, there is no way this can happen two weeks in a row,” said Peebles, who lives just north of Raleigh in the same Wakefield neighborhood as former NC State greats DeWayne Washington and Torry Holt. “But if the pass had been about six inches shorter, it would have. It was just beyond my out-stretched hands.”
Proving, of course, that once-in-a-million can’t happen twice in a row.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.