— Now that we’ve established what NC State Stuff is, it requires a bit of a history lesson. If there is this curse around the program, has it always been there to some extent and was it only exacerbated by the turmoil surrounding the program in the 1990s?

The first example of it is certainly up for debate. NC State’s student paper The Technician has only existed since 1920, but even then, it doesn’t take much combing through to find perhaps the first known reference:

“With two brilliant victories behind them, State’s team journed to Washington to meet Georgetown on October 9. N.C. State’s old jinx seemed to be aboard on this day, for Georgetown decisively defeated us by the score of 27 to 0. The game, however, was much closer than the score would indicate. Our team outplayed Georgetown in the first half but was unable to score any points. Several beautiful forward passes were executed, but the advantage thus gained was more than offset by penalties for holding in the line and offside play.”

NC State had been coming off a surprise, upset win over Navy, only to let down in their next game against a team they should have beaten. Sound familiar?

Or perhaps it was this reference a 1950 issue of The Technician, which references a game played in 1949:

“Louisville defeated State 72-71 last season at the Memorial Auditorium in what many consider the most exciting game the Wolfpack has ever played. Here’s what happened. State was ahead 71-70 with less than 30 seconds left to play. (Referee) Arnold Heft gave the ball to the Cardinals out of bounds on a much disputed play. The ball was thrown to substitute center Truitt Demoisey who hooked it in the basket as the final gun sounded. This was Demoisey’s only points during the entire game, but they were enough to give the Wolfpack its first defeat on their home court since Coach Case came to State.”

Heft, by the way, later bought the Washington Bullets. I don’t know if that’s NC State Stuff or not, but it is certainly bizarre. It would be like if former ACC referee Karl Hess randomly bought the Milwaukee Bucks.

This, from an October 1950 issue of The Technician, also references...the Stuff.

“The State eleven finally won that big game for a change. After playing Duke and Carolina and losing two heartbreakers it seemed like asking too much for the Wolfpack to rebound against Maryland and get a major victory. About the only real thumping State got this year was at the hands of the Clemson Tigers .The Duke and Carolina game could have gone either way, but the breaks always seem to favor our opponents. I’m not taking any credit away from Duke or Carolina, but any observer of football realizes that when two good teams meet, the winner usually has to receive a few breaks, at the proper time. The ironic twist to all of this is that Maryland will probably dump Duke and Carolina by comfortable margins. That’s what makes this unpredictable game of football so interesting.”

But no one started throwing around the terminology of any sort of jinx regarding NC State athletics until...well, until things started to go badly.

There are plenty of examples NC State fans can point to, but one that comes up as the first example quite often is the traveling call whistled on NC State’s Chris Corchiani in the 1989 NCAA Tournament against Georgetown.

The Beginning of the End

In a lot of ways, 1989 was sort of the beginning of the end. It was NC State’s last regular-season ACC title in either major sport. NC State fans don’t count it, of course, because their former head coach Everett Case helped make the ACC Tournament into the event that it is and in a lot of ways, March Madness as well. The ACC Champion was the ACC Tournament winner, and it remains so.

And so taking 1989 out of the equation, 1987 was NC State’s last ACC title (in basketball). But in 1989, NC State was a 5-seed and reached the Sweet 16, facing off against No. 1 Georgetown. Remember, Georgetown was a behemoth in college basketball in the 1980s, reaching the Elite 8 six times, the Final Four three times and winning one national title with loads of NBA talent.

Maybe NC State is going to make another run - not quite a Cinderella run of 1983, of course, when NC State had been a 6-seed, but eerily close.

NC State was down just three with 1:47 to go. Chris Corchiani drove into the lane and scored, hitting the deck afterwards as the whistle blew. It looks like he’s going to have a chance to tie the game. Except...he was called for traveling.

The call was so questionable it made CBS color man Billy Packer laugh on air. The game was being played in New Jersey, and the crowd can be clearly heard booing the call as well.

The call is at the 6-minute mark of this video.

“Nowhere near a walk!” Packer said on the replay. “Should’ve been a good basket and a foul. No steps at all, not even close!”

That game, though, came just months after the crumbling in NC State’s foundation had already begun.

The Fall of Valvano

In January of that same season, former NC State head coach Jim Valvano learned that Peter Golenbock’s book “Personal Fouls” was going to be published - and it was about him, and alleged corruption surrounding his program.

Golenbock made a lot of accusations, many of which were from unnamed sources. But his major named source was a former manager, John Simonds. He was dismissed after the 1987 season. Valvano and NC State - even the North Carolina attorney general at the time - threatened to sue the publisher, Simon and Schuster, because of the questionable use of sources and allegedly paying for information.

But the Raleigh News and Observer started looking into the allegations, and some - like the illegal sale/exchange of tickets and sneakers given to the players - were corroborated, at least in part. Golenbock’s book had many salacious allegations, but one in particular was that NC State and Valvano were knowingly cheating to keep players academically eligible.

Nothing like that was ever corroborated - just that NC State was having trouble graduating its players, and that maybe some of its players weren’t as into the student part of being a student-athlete. That was something that, according to those who covered the league around that time, you could have found at any school. But Golenbock’s accusations shined a light specifically on NC State.

Finally, the book was published by a small company in August of 1989, but a lot of the damage had been done. Multiple investigations were conducted: by the Board of Governors, the school itself and the NCAA. NC State’s chancellor resigned later that same month that Golenbock’s book was actually released.

The ordeal took a lot out of the normally-vivacious and bubbly Valvano. He wanted to stay on as athletic director and coach, and ultimately he would have settled for either. He was forced to resign as athletic director in the fall of 1989.

The NCAA’s investigation concluded in December of 1989 - rather hastily, by today’s standards - and handed NC State two years of probation and a one-year postseason ban (in 1990). Then in 1990, allegations of point shaving surfaced and former NC State center Charles Shackleford had admitted to accepting “improper payments”. That turned up the heat on Valvano.

Just after the 1990 season ended, he was officially out as head coach, reaching a settlement with NC State. Allegedly, NC State even threatened to sue Valvano to avoid paying him $500,000 because of a clause in his contract related to academics. The way Valvano’s departure was handled did not sit well with people.

Valvano had begged the Board of Trustees to let him coach for just $1 the next season. He had wanted to fix it. They said no.

Les Robinson, a former NC State player under Norm Sloan, took over as head coach. The postseason ban and probation were issue enough for Robinson, but the real issue became NC State’s self-imposed penalties, which included scholarship reductions, no off-campus recruiting or official paid visits for a year and one fewer assistant coach for two seasons. In addition, NC State raised admission requirements that were more stringent than the ACC.

James Curle, formerly of the Riddick and Reynolds podcast and NC State graduate, is 39. A born and bred State fan, he remembers the downward spiral.

“I remember the tail end of the basketball glory era a few years after ‘83 when Valvano was still there and we were still a national name. And then the scandal happens. Football has never really had huge expectations, but we had won ACC titles in the past,” Curle said.

“Having not won an ACC title since ‘87 when every other school in the ACC has won either a basketball or football title since is the element of frustration that really gives NC State stuff its life. It’s that feeling of why can’t we just break through this ceiling and get one, get a title?”

Football Can't Quite Break Through

Except football was actually doing quite well in the early 1990s. Dick Sheridan had a combined 18-6-1 record overall in 1991 and 1992, and he went 11-4 in that span as well. He finished second in the ACC both seasons. NC State was clearly on an upward trajectory.

Sheridan cited health reasons for his retirement, but he had been very unhappy with the way that the NC State administration had treated his good friend Valvano. In fact, during Sheridan’s retirement press conference, he mentioned that he had visited with Valvano as his good friend lay dying just months before, and Valvano told him to focus on his own health and well-being. That’s likely not all the two old friends discussed.

Sheridan retired in late June 1993, in the hopes that one of his top assistants would get the job. Instead, it went to his quarterbacks coach Mike O’Cain. NC State slipped back into mediocrity. But Sheridan’s retirement came just two months after Valvano succumbed to cancer.

Valvano’s spirit lingered around his former program until his death. Even though it isn’t nearly as famous as his ESPY “Never Give Up” speech, he gave a speech at Reynolds Coliseum in February of 1993 - two months before his death, less than two weeks before that famous ESPY speech. It was the 10-year anniversary of his 1983 national championship team. And NC State people will tell you that speech was as important to them as the ESPY one.

He almost wasn’t physically able to appear in Reynolds as bone cancer ravaged his body. It was the first time he’d been back since he’d been forced out. On April 28, 1993, he died of cancer, leaving behind an incredibly important legacy, including the V Foundation to support cancer research.

So within a two-month span, NC State lost its most beloved basketball coach and a football coach that could have built a steady program for years to come, even as Mack Brown arrived in Chapel Hill around the same time and Steve Logan got things going at East Carolina.

The point isn’t that any of these goings-on in the early 1990s were examples of NC State Stuff. No, the point is that any examples that follow - and there are many - stem FROM this specific time period, the early 1990s.

It's All Timing

NC State has overcome NCAA issues before in its program’s history. But this time, they just happened to coincide with the rise of Duke as a program under head coach Mike Krzyzewski AND the resurgence, if you want to call it that, of North Carolina under Dean Smith, who had a Final Four “drought” from 1982-91 and had “only” won one national title until 1993. Krzyzewski had zero until 1991 (he won back-to-back titles in 1991 and 1992).

There are plenty of examples listed in the litany of NC State Stuff history, even when the team wasn’t as good. But to Curle and other fans, the most impactful examples aren’t in 2010 when Chandler Parsons of Florida hit a halfcourt shot to beat them or even Bryan Underwood being called out of bounds on a long touchdown run against Clemson back in 2013, Dave Doeren’s first year in which NC State didn’t win an ACC game anyway.

Curle is an eternal optimist as an NC State fan. So it was hard for him to make the repeated gut punches otherwise known as NC State Stuff mean anything, particularly when the program struggled so much under Robinson until 1996, when Herb Sendek took over - and even after that, until 2002 when Sendek finally broke through. Around that same time, NC State also had arguably the best quarterback in its program’s history, Philip Rivers.

That was when NC State Stuff started to feel more acute to Curle. Being so close, and yet...

“If I had to pick one, maybe it’s the ‘03 ACC title game. I know that’s kind of late on the calendar for the notion of NC State stuff. But that’s when I felt like just this sense of dread, like, you know what, we’re never going to get over this hump,” Curle said.

While North Carolina was still making a comeback of its own in 2003 after a dreadful 2002 season under Matt Doherty, Duke was at the top of the college basketball pyramid and Maryland wasn’t far behind, having won the national title a year before. Wake Forest won the ACC in spite of not even having Chris Paul on its roster yet.

It was a window. And NC State just couldn’t climb through it. It was Sendek’s third ACC title game appearance and second in a row. In 2002, Duke had thumped the Wolfpack by 31.

“If we can’t beat a Duke team that we’ve got on a ropes with a very talented roster...if we can’t keep JJ Redick from hitting 30-footers to beat us, then maybe there is something to it,” Curle said, of this NC State Stuff.

Redick, then a freshman, would go down as one of the best players in college basketball history. He had 23 points in the final 10 minutes to erase NC State’s 15-point lead with 11:44 to play.

And another popular example is in 2004, said Backing the Pack’s Steven Muma. The always-rational Muma won’t let himself stray into belief in NC State Stuff in a non-joking way, but even he had trouble explaining the 2004 ACC Tournament semifinals.

“One that I know a lot of folks like to point to was the one where, it was the ACC Tournament, 10-12 years ago, and NC State is playing Maryland, I believe. Somebody - a student assistant or a manager - is wiping up sweat off the corner of the floor in the end zone, not impacting anything, and gets called for a technical foul,” Muma said.

“Stuff like that is just - those are the things that make you look up at the sky and kind of wonder.”

That weird technical helped lead to a collapse that saw NC State lose a 19-point halftime lead.

As we’ve already learned, individual instances of NC State Stuff are often as much about timing as they are about the weirdness of the incidences themselves. They always happen at the worst possible moment, seemingly. And the results are never good.

Is It On The Coaches?

And that’s been true of NC State’s coaching searches as well, which have their own subsection in the so-called lore of NC State Stuff. In 2006 and 2011, NC State badly botched their coaching hires to the point of national embarrassment, although current athletic director Debbie Yow’s only search (in 2011) yielded Mark Gottfried, who was a very good hire, all things considered (yes, even considering the way things ended).

But there was public rejection after public rejection, and too many internal leaks to plug as all of the ins and outs of the search became far too public. John Calipari, Rick Barnes, John Beilein - all either said no or NC State couldn’t make it work, as in the case of Beilein. But all made NC State think they might say yes.

Then in 2011, there was “sabotage” by former Maryland coach Gary Williams against his former boss Yow, who he didn’t like and didn’t mind telling other coaches so.

Now with another search coming up, NC State will seek to be on the right side of history. Even this search comes at a less than ideal time, with Yow on her way out in the next few years as athletic director. Still, neither Mike Krzyzewski nor UNC’s current head coach Roy Williams will be coaching much longer, one would think. And so NC State’s next hire could indeed be still here when both men are gone down Tobacco Road.

Does that mean either or both programs will slip back to previous levels? No. But they could. There’s a window.

In the meantime, NC State Stuff - losing on a last-second shot or a missed field goal or surrendering a big lead - will continue to happen. Because those things happen to every program, or because it’s unique to NC State?

Next week.