ACC football record book: NC State’s Ted Brown’s career rushing mark has lasted 42 years

Editor’s note: This is part of a 10-story series focusing on ACC football records. See the bottom of this story for a list of all the other content in the series.

RALEIGH — Ted Brown might be the only person in the country who wouldn’t be too upset if COVID-19 ruined any chances of there being college football this fall.

Jokingly, of course — he’s not rooting for the virus to continue to change our way of living. But if there is no college football in 2020, Brown’s long-standing record still has a chance.

“COVID-19, COVID-19,” Brown jokes in a chant before letting out a hearty laugh. “I might be still standing out there.”

It’s been 42 years since Brown, 63, last carried a football for N.C. State. When he left Raleigh in 1978 he finished with 4,602 rushing yards. That number is still the most in the ACC, still the standard four decades later. But for how long?

Clemson’s Travis Etienne decided to come back for his senior season and is 564 yards behind Brown. Barring any major injuries (knock on wood) to Etienne, Brown knows this year his record will fall. He’s OK with it, he likes Etienne and considers himself a fan.

“I’m pretty sure if he does what he did the last three years he’s going to break it,” Brown said. “I kind of watch him a little bit because he’s a pretty good back. He does a lot of good things and I knew he was getting close. I know he’s a good football player on a very good football team.”

Brown, the gold standard of ACC rushing, currently lives in Minnesota. He rarely gets back to Raleigh for games, when he does he likes to remain incognito. For the players like Etienne, Dalvin Cook (Florida State), A.J. Dillon (Boston College) and Lamar Jackson (Louisville), who were within reach of Brown’s record and weren’t even born when Brown played, he’s just a name. A number that they strived to pass.

SLOW START TO LEGENDARY CAREER

Brown came to Raleigh from T.W. Andrews in High Point, N.C. It’s crazy to think that the all-time leading rusher in N.C. State history was seldom used in games early his freshman season. Schools still had junior varsity teams then, and while Brown earned a few kickoff returns with the varsity early in the season, he never got a carry. On JV he was playing well, so well that he felt like he had outplayed the talent and was ready for the big time.

“Yeah, I had been ready,” Brown said followed by another laugh. “I was out there taking over on JV. We played Chowan College, I had four touchdowns and 200 and some yards rushing, I was ready to go.”

Brown played in 10 varsity games as a freshman in 1975, but didn’t get any offensive carries until week five. After playing in a JV game earlier that day, Brown watched the varsity at Michigan State, eventually falling to the Spartans, 37-15. When the team arrived back in Raleigh coach Lou Holtz called a meeting with his freshman running back.

“He said ‘well if I’m going to lose I might as well lose with freshmen,’” Brown recalled. “He said ‘Ted you’re in.’ I said alright then and that’s kind of how I got started.”

As a freshman Brown rushed for 913 yards and 12 touchdowns on the varsity. Had he played offense all season, he could have easily left N.C. State with four consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and his record way out of reach. But he doesn’t dwell on that too much. He wanted to play on the varsity right away, but now he appreciates having to wait his turn. He admits at the time he was irritated, feeling like he should have been out there. Now he can say that Holtz knew what he was doing by not giving him varsity touches right away.

Brown’s sophomore year he started 11 games and ran for 1,088 yards and 13 touchdowns. In 1977 and 1978, his junior and senior years, Brown really took off. As a junior he rushed for 1,251 and another 13 touchdowns. By that point Brown could no longer sneak up on opponents. But even though N.C. State, like most schools, were run heavy, there was no way to game plan against Brown.

“Every opponent stacked their defenses to try to neutralize Ted’s running,” former Wolfpack quarterback Johnny Evans said. “Because we ran the triple option, it was difficult for defenses to key on one person.”

Evans had the best view of Brown’s running ability for five years. The two were high school teammates for a couple of seasons, and backfield mates at N.C. State for three.

“Ted was so versatile,” Evans wrote in an email to the News & Observer. “He was tough enough to run between the tackles and swift enough to run in space. Balance was Ted’s greatest strength. He had a wide base and rarely was caught with one foot way off the ground ... very low center of gravity.”

State was rarely in the I-formation so if a team tried to load up on Brown’s side when they lined up in split backs, Evans had the green light to flip the play to the other side. Either way, Brown was hard to stop when he did get the ball, using that combination of power, balance and speed to wreak havoc on opposing defenses.

FAVORITE GAMES

Brown’s best game, stat-wise, was 251 yards against Penn State in 1977, still a school record.

Brown tore down the Nittany Lions’ top-ranked defense, so much so that he went through a bunch of tear-away No. 23 jerseys and was forced to finish the game wearing No. 19.

“That was probably my most memorable game in college because they had the No. 1 defense,” Brown recalled. “They were giving up 50-some yards a game and I went for 251 on them. We had some horses up front, it wasn’t like I did it all on my own. I had some good guys blocking for me.”

Brown also had some horses when he broke free for what’s still the school’s longest touchdown run from scrimmage, a 95-yard score against Syracuse in 1977.

“I knew he was going to score after the first 10 yards,” Evans recalls.

Another game that stands out to Brown was the Tangerine Bowl against Pittsburgh his senior season. Brown felt disrespected by the Panthers in more ways than one, and took out his frustrations on the field.

“Those guys were so disrespectful to us, talking about how they wish they could play somebody with a higher ranking,” Brown said. “We went to the hospital to give kids some gifts and they came behind us and took the gifts away from the kids. I’ll never forget that. We owned them. I went for about 200 and something on them and they were supposed to be such a great team and we beat them. Those games were OK games because we played against great defenses, we were getting no respect, they were basically saying we shouldn’t be there.”

BROWN’S LEGACY

N.C. State markets itself as ‘Quarterback U’ and rightfully so. Last season five former Wolfpack quarterbacks were on NFL rosters: Philip Rivers, Ryan Finley, Russell Wilson, Mike Glennon and Jacoby Brissett. The quarterback position for many years has been the face of a program on all levels. If they are good, like all five of those players were in college, even better.

Rivers has been a perennial Pro Bowl player at the NFL level and Wilson won a Super Bowl in just his second season. That alone has helped both players’ legacy grow in Raleigh even years after their playing days at N.C. State ended.

Brown played in an era when teams used the pass to catch teams off guard from run heavy offenses. Toward the end of his tenure, college football was morphing to pass happy offenses and running backs became less and less valued, in most cases.

Because Rivers and Wilson and other N.C. State quarterbacks are held in such high regard by a younger generation of fans, Brown’s accomplishments can sometimes be overlooked. They definitely shouldn’t be.

“Because N.C. State, with very good reason, branded itself as Quarterback U’ it doesn’t diminish the legacy of what was once a great running back institution,” Tim Peeler, an author who has written several books about Wolfpack athletics and is the unofficial N.C. State athletics historian told the News & Observer. “But it does dim the light on that a little bit in terms of some of the great running backs N.C. State has had. There was a long string of running backs N.C. State had at that time who came in and ran an offense under Lou Holtz and Bo Rein that was specifically designed to get lots of yards on the ground and Ted Brown just happened to be one of the greatest all-time in college football to be able to do that.”

Brown had 27 games in his career where he rushed for 100 yards or more. He’s also the school’s all-time leader in all purpose yards with 5,565. In fact Evans and Peeler both talked about Brown’s ability as a pass catcher, and how that gets overlooked (led the team in receiving three times), and his skills as a return man. Peeler also pointed out that Brown even threw a few touchdown passes during his career.

In 1977 Brown averaged 14.0 yards per carry and his 49 rushing touchdowns are still a school record. Brown is 960 yards in front of the second-leading rusher in school history. All that even though his stats from bowl games (399 yards in three games) aren’t counted in his final total, while postseason games for players after 2002, including eight games for Etienne, are.

“He would have been one of the five or 10 running backs in the history of college football to gain more than 5,000 yards on the ground in their career,” Peeler said. “Things like that diminish a little bit the legacy of what Ted Brown did, but the man has owned the ACC rushing record for more than 40 years and nothing can really diminish that because nobody is ever going to hold a record like that for that long.”

THE SCHEDULE FOR THIS SERIES

(Dates the stories will be posted online)

MAY 24 — Duke’s DeVon Edwards scored three non-offensive touchdowns in one game, including interception returns for touchdowns on consecutive plays from scrimmage.

MAY 25 — Big Jim Tatum won the first ACC championship as coach at Maryland. He went on to coach at UNC shortly after and had turned a struggling program around. He might have broken every ACC coaching record in the book and been on par with coaches like Bobby Bowden and Dabo Sweeney had he not died suddenly in 1959.

MAY 26 — Wake Forest quarterback Rusty LaRue holds records for single-game pass attempts (78), single-game pass completions (55), total offensive plays in a game (82) and a few others from a crazy 1995 stretch where he threw for 478 yards against Duke, 501 against Georgia Tech and 545 against N.C. State.

MAY 27 — N.C. State wide receiver Torry Holt has the record for most receiving touchdowns in a game with five against Florida State, which was ranked No. 3 in the country.

MAY 28 — Don McCauley, a UNC running back from 1968-70, has the ACC record for most rushing attempts in a season with 360 in 1970. He also owns the ACC record for the most plays from scrimmage in a single season with 375 that same year. The most interesting stat associated with McCauley is that he broke the ACC record for most rushing yards in a season with 1,863 yards in 1970, a record that stood for 43 years.

MAY 29 — Duke receivers Conner Vernon and Jamison Crowder are tied for the ACC career receptions record with 283 apiece. They were teammates for a time in the early 2010s.

MAY 31 — North Carolina’s Kendric Burney has the record for most interception return yardage in a game — 170 against Miami in 2009.

JUNE 1 — N.C. State’s Ted Brown still holds the ACC career rushing record, a mark he set from 1975-78.

JUNE 2 — Wake Forest’s Tanner Price has the ACC passing record by a left-handed quarterback.

JUNE 3 — A quick roundup of other interesting and important ACC footbal records leads with the 2011 Clemson team, which became the first in ACC history to win three straight games against ranked opponents. That team had a bevy of kids from the state of North Carolina.

FROM THE ACC RECORD BOOK

Career rushing yardage — 1. Ted Brown (North Carolina State, 1975-78) — 4,602 rushing yards; 2. Dalvin Cook (Florida State, 2014-16) — 4,464 rushing yards; 3. Amos Lawrence (North Carolina, 1977-80) — 4,391 rushing yards; 4. LaMont Jordan (Maryland, 1997-2000) — 4,147 rushing yards; 5. Lamar Jackson (Louisville, 2015-17) — 4,132 rushing yards

Season rushing yardage — 1. Andre Williams (Boston College, 2013) — 2,177; 2. Thomas Jones (Virginia, 1999) — 1,798; 3. (tie) James Conner (Pittsburgh, 2014) — 1,765; 3. (tie) Dalvin Cook (Florida State, 2016) — 1,765; 5. Don McCauley (North Carolina, 1970) — 1,720

Career rushing touchdowns — 1. James Connor (Pittsburgh, 2013-14, 2016) — 52; 2. Lamar Jackson (Louisville, 2015-17) — 50; 3. Ted Brown (North Carolina State, 1975-78) — 49; 4. James Davis (Clemson, 2005-08) — 47; 5. Dalvin Cook (Florida State, 2014-16) — 46

Season rushing touchdowns — 1. James Conner (Pittsburgh, 2014) — 26; 2. Travis Etienne (Clemson, 2018) — 24; 3. (tie) Ryan Williams (Virginia Tech, 2009) — 21; 3. (tie) Lamar Jackson (Louisville, 2016) — 21; 5. (tie) Robert Lavette (Georgia Tech, 1982) — 19; 5. (tie) Don McCauley (North Carolina, 1970) — 19; 5. (tie) Dalvin Cook (twice) (Florida State, 2015 and 2016) — 19