In a game many fans and members of the media expected the Pack to play in before the season, Clemson will take on Georgia Tech Saturday in the 2009 Dr Pepper ACC Championship game. The 2009 ACC Football Kickoff predicted the Pack to finish in third place in the Atlantic Division. 10 of 87 voters selected coach Tom O’Brien’s team as winners of the Atlantic, and two of those chose the Pack as their favorite to win the ACC title.
But having just completed the season with a 5-7 record and 2-6 mark in conference play, fans, coaches and players alike will now spend the offseason wondering what went wrong. The trying nature of the season left O’Brien with a unique outlook after Saturday’s season-ending victory over the Tar Heels, which ended the Pack’s season without a trip to a bowl game.
“This is the hardest year I’ve ever been through coaching,” O’Brien said. “It’s a disaster right now. Thank God it’s over. I don’t think we could go play in a bowl if we had to.”
The Pack’s problems started more than a month before the Sept. 3 season opener against South Carolina. The June 28 car wreck that broke redshirt junior linebacker Nate Irving’s leg and collapsed one of his lungs began an onslaught of injuries to vital Pack players, especially on the defensive side of the ball.
“You start off with your best football player on defense [Irving] almost kills himself in the summer,” O’Brien said. “You end the year with your offensive coordinator in the hospital with cancer. You go through; we lost a couple more guys. … We went through with 16 or 17 season-ending injuries. That’s unheard of, for a football program to have to go through what these kids go through.”
Without Irving, whose 84 tackles and three interceptions as a sophomore earned him All-ACC honors, the defense struggled mightily. Several other injuries and an abundance of inexperience, particularly in the secondary and line-backing core, were largely responsible for the problems on the defensive side of the ball, where State surrendered 31.5 points per game. At least two freshmen started in the defensive backfield in nine of the Wolfpack’s 12 games. On the year, the Pack used eight different starting lineups in the secondary, with three freshmen, two true and one redshirt, starting at three of the four positions in each of the final three games.
“There’s many times this thing could have folded and gone south,” O’Brien said. “We’re like a M*A*S*H unit out there. Every play, somebody breaks this or hurts that.”
That the team persevered through all the adversity it faced and finished with a victory over North Carolina was a credit to the work ethic of the seniors, redshirt sophomore quarterback Russell Wilson said.
“The seniors came out hard and they’ve been coming out hard the whole year and fighting hard,” Wilson said. “We’ve come up short a lot of times, but coming out today and winning that game was big for us. It meant a lot. The seniors have been so dedicated, coming out early in the winters, coming out early in the summer, working their butts off.”
Redshirt senior running back Toney Baker did not deny that ending the season with an upset victory over a UNC team that entered the game ranked No. 24 meant a lot to his team, but said the win didn’t completely soothe the pain of such a difficult season.
“It doesn’t really make up, but it does a lot for our program,” Baker said. “Going into the offseason, it’s a great feeling to beat your rival. That was a good Carolina team. Just to come out with a win like we did is big for coach O’Brien and our program, and the fans, especially.”
