N.C. State coach endures ups and downs in 2011

RALIEGH --?

Tom O'Brien, an-older-than-"old school" football coach and former Marine major, doesn't speak without thinking first.

So when O'Brien said after N.C. State's 37-13 win over Clemson on Nov. 19, a victory as unexpected as it was thorough: "I really have no explanation for what just happened," he wasn't trying to be glib.

It was that kind of difficult-to-put-into-words season for the 63-year-old coach and his fifth Wolfpack team.

Earlier this week, with the clarity afforded by time, linebacker Audie Cole provided an explanation - for the Clemson win, the 2011 season and perhaps the last five years of Wolfpack football - an explanation that escaped his austere coach after the Clemson game. "We lost some games that we shouldn't have," said Cole, a fifth-year senior who was in O'Brien's first recruiting class, "and we kind of got away with some wins that maybe we shouldn't have. It goes both ways."

A season that started with the controversial exit of popular quarterback Russell Wilson, and a 2-3 record, ended with five Wolfpack wins in the final seven regular-season games.

The season ends with the Pack's third bowl trip in four years on Dec. 27 to play Louisville in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte. Significant injuries, for the fourth time in O'Brien's five seasons, threatened to derail the season.

"The list (of problems) is too long right now," O'Brien said after a 44-14 loss on nationial television at Cincinnati.

Which is why, three months later - after the fifth straight win over North Carolina, the upset of Clemson and the bowl-clinching win over Maryland, O'Brien commends his players for what they were able to accomplish in 2011.

"It was as difficult of a season as any as I've been around," said O'Brien, who has been a head coach for 15 years and an assistant for another 22. "It ended up being the most rewarding. The players came back and fought to get back to a bowl game. That was one of their main goals when the season started and they did it."

'This isn't easy'

Tom O'Brien won 75 games in 10 seasons at Boston College. He was hired by N.C. State after the 2006 season to do the same: build a consistent winner without compromising his integrity or the school's academic reputation.

His final eight teams at BC went to a bowl, with the last seven winning their bowl game, including a rare win by a visiting team at Boise State in 2005. The players and recruits O'Brien left behind at BC, led by star quarterback Matt Ryan, went on to win the ACC's Atlantic Division in 2007 and '08.

O'Brien has compiled a 32-30 overall record in five seasons, with an 18-22 ACC mark, at N.C. State. O'Brien wants to win more, and expects to win more - even after inheriting a 3-9 team from Chuck Amato in the winter of 2006 -- but injuries and inconsistencies have slowed the program's momentum.

That fact does not escape O'Brien or Wolfpack athletic director Debbie Yow.

"This isn't easy," said O'Brien, who was 31-27 in his first five years at BC. "It's hard to win football games."

He's heard it all

O'Brien's contract, worth about $1.5 million a year, runs through the 2015 season, an extension he signed in July 2009 with former athletic director Lee Fowler, the AD who hired him.

The four full years remaining of the contract didn't slow any speculation about O'Brien's future in the second half of the 2011 season. Every week became a referendum on O'Brien, who was criticized by some for the public split with Wilson, who led Wisconsin to the Rose Bowl this season. Criticism is an occupational hazard for a coach, one that O'Brien understands fully and doesn't let bother him.

"I had a plebe year (at the Naval Academy)," O'Brien said. "There isn't anything that hasn't already been said or done to me."

Wilson's exit dominated the topic of conversation in early part of the season, as Wilson had the Badgers off to a 5-0 start and State languished at 2-3.

O'Brien wanted Wilson to participate in spring practice. Wilson, a fourth-round draft pick of the Colorado Rockies in 2009, wanted to play baseball and then come back in August, as he did before the 2010 season.

Source: http://www.heraldonline.com/2011/12/23/3622630/nc-state-coach-endures-ups-and.html

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