As his teammates celebrated on the field last year after a dramatic win over rival North Carolina, Andre Brown stood on one leg in Carter-Finley Stadium’s tunnel with crutches underneath his arms.

Brown had waited for this moment, fighting through morning regiments at Hargrave Military Academy, injuries, and, at times, unmet expectations. The Greenville native yearned to be on the field with his teammates celebrating a long-awaited win over a bitter rival. Instead, Brown didn’t feel a part of things.

“I was there, but I just didn’t feel I was one with the team,” Brown said.

This year, he was rewarded for his work. Brown has become one of the team’s senior leaders, rallying his troops from a 2-6 hole to his own win over UNC this year and a chance to become bowl eligible with a win Saturday.

Now, as Brown sets to step through that tunnel for the last time at Carter-Finley this Saturday as the team’s leading rusher, he looks back on a career that has had as many twists and turns as any N.C. State player in recent memory. But Brown thanks God for it and plans to take it all in.

“I’m playing Division-I ball on Saturdays in front of 60,000, 80,000 people, national TV,” Brown said. “Every time I take a knee in that stadium before the game, I think about that. And this time it will be my last time here.”

The PARADE All-American

As a high school All-American, Brown received star treatment growing up in Greenville. He and everyone else in Eastern North Carolina knew he was going to do big things.

“I was smellin’ myself, walking around like my stuff don’t stink,” Brown said.

Add to his resume a 248-yard performance against Southern Miss in only his fourth collegiate game, followed the very next week with a 179-yard game at Florida State.

And don’t forget his highlight reel plays. Brown was arguably the originator of the defender hurdle, now made popular by highly-publicized running backs like Georgia’s Knowshon Moreno and Ohio State’s Beanie Wells.

“I’m not even going to lie to you, I’ve been doing that on national TV for years now,” Brown said. “I mean I respect [Moreno], but I’ve been doing this for a while.”

But for every instance of greatness in Brown, there seems to be a roadblock. In his senior year of high school, it was his own ego.

Lessons at Hargrave

Being “the guy” — as he puts it — in high school admittedly got to Brown’s head. He was receiving offers from some of the top schools in the country.

But when it came time to qualifying for NCAA play, Brown didn’t meet the standards. Instead he was off to Hargrave Military Academy — a prep school in Chatham, Va.

It was there that he came to grips with what he was doing to his own life, where he realized that fooling around could be costing him his future. But even at Hargrave, the staff saw leadership potential in Brown, naming him a lieutenant and making him responsible for getting his fellow classmates in line.

The Hargrave experience humbled Brown, he said, as he realized he can’t just use his talents for his own benefit — they have to be utilized as part of a team. Now, set to graduate, Brown plans to work with kids to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes he did.

“I want to make sure there’s not another Andre Brown who ends up too big-headed and then ending up in a situation he should have never been in if he had just gone to school and did what he had to do,” Brown said.

From star freshman to senior leader

Brown felt on top of the world after the Florida State game his freshman year. Wolfpack fans labeled him as the next great N.C. State running back, in the bruiser mold of Ted Brown and Joe McIntosh.  

“I wanted to be that big back that carried the team,” Brown said. “I wanted to live up to everything.”

The offense sputtered badly his sophomore year — former coach Chuck Amato’s last — and after starting the first half of his junior year on pace for a 1,000-yard season, Brown fractured his foot, derailing his season and clearing the way for his current backfield counterpart, Jamelle Eugene.

“I’m not going to lie, if I had a 1,000-yard season last year, who knows, I may not have come back for my senior season,” Brown said. “But that was God’s sign to say that I’m not ready yet.”

It paved the way for him to become a senior leader who players credit for rallying the team to a win over ECU early in the season by encouraging them both from the sidelines and on the field. And now, ready for his final home game, Brown needs just 73 yards to move into eighth on State’s all-time rushing list.

This season, Brown has turned into a consistent power back to compliment Eugene’s shiftiness. After recovering from surgery in the offseason, Brown says he wasn’t at 100 percent until the Duke game. But coach Tom O’Brien has seen improvement in him each week.

“As we went into the second and third game of the year he started to run inside with a little more power,” O’Brien said. “He found out he was pretty good at it and has gotten better as the year’s gone on.”

Before he test the NFL waters, Brown is yearning for a bowl game to cap off his career. It would give him the chance to spend a few more weeks with the players that have worked with him and encouraged him through thick and thin.

“You realize that this is going to be my last time running out of that stadium, touching the wolf, waking up with them and being around them all the time,” Brown said. “This is the last go-around and you can’t help but get emotional.”