After salvaging seasons gone wrong, Brennan Armstrong and the Wolfpack run out of time
All Brennan Armstrong could do was watch. The season dripped away, play by play, and with it the chance to do something only one of this N.C. State team’s predecessors had ever done.
The Wolfpack was right there, two points away, but it needed the ball back. At some point. Four minutes ticked into five, then six, then seven. Two Kansas State touchdowns came off the board. A third did not.
By the time N.C. State got its chance, time and the odds were against it, down two scores, down to two timeouts. Armstrong’s final pass in a Wolfpack uniform was an interception, trying to drive the ball downfield, but it’s hardly how his one season in red will be remembered.
It’ll be for how Armstrong responded to the first time he was asked to watch, and wait, after his early season benching. It’ll be remembered for the way he handled it, the way he asked his teammates to play even harder for the next guy, and how hard they ended up playing when the next guy eventually ended up being him.
And it will be remembered for the way Armstrong played when he did step back in, leading the Wolfpack to wins in the final three games of the season and this berth in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, giving N.C. State a chance to win 10 games for the second time in school history, denied in the end by a 28-19 loss to the Wildcats even as Armstrong became the Wolfpack’s first and only 100-yard rusher of the season.
“I was just kind of antsy waiting to get back on the field, to see what we could do with the time remaining,” Armstrong said. “There was still 2:40 left. I’ve seen crazier stuff happen. We wanted to score quick and get the ball back.”
The Wolfpack knew a little something, by that point, about not giving up on lost causes. N.C. State had to dig deep into an identity built over a decade to salvage a season foundering on the rocks, relying on players who had been indoctrinated in the ways of the program, year after year. The quarterback who came in for a single season did as much to turn things around as anyone, even when he wasn’t playing.
“He won the locker room the day he got benched, because of how he handled it, and full circle, he gets the job back, his teammates went crazy for him,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said. “I think it says a lot about the kind of teammate you can be when things don’t go your way. He inspired a lot of people. Including me.”
Armstrong arrived in a whirlwind of expectations, reunited with Robert Anae, the offensive coordinator who had helped him put up video-game numbers at Virginia. But he had lost the starting job by the end of September, benched in favor of M.J. Morris after a home loss to Louisville.
When he got it back, five games later, after Morris decided to redshirt in the middle of the Wolfpack’s newfound renaissance, Armstrong seemed a different player. The emergence of freshman KC Concepcion helped, to be sure, the playmaker the Wolfpack had lacked. But it was more than that, with Armstrong’s redemption mirroring that of the Wolfpack.
Armstrong played hurt in the win over North Carolina to end the regular season, and took a beating Thursday, pounding out yardage on the ground whether he was supposed to be running or throwing. And in this bowl game, he brought the Wolfpack to the brink of history before they, essentially, ran out of time.
After Trent Pennix scored a 60-yard touchdown on a fake punt to make it 21-19 after a failed two-point conversion, the Wolfpack believed it would find a way to win. But it couldn’t find a way to get the ball again for almost eight minutes, by which point it was too late. For the second time in three seasons, nine wins would not become 10.
“I wanted it. I wanted to do it,” Armstrong said. “Ending it the way we did, with the five-game win streak, trying to get this bowl win here, we just fell short.”
As a new one-season quarterback arrives next fall in Coastal Carolina’s Grayson McCall, Doeren said he hoped Armstrong would get a shot in the NFL, either as a Taysom Hill-type dual threat or a reliable clipboard carrier, admitting it was hard to predict that future, even for someone who ran for 27 touchdowns and threw for 69 to go with almost 11,000 yards in his ACC career.
“But man, is he a competitive dude,” Doeren said. “And he’s a great teammate. I’d love to see him get a shot.”
The professional career he may try to build will likely have to be built the same way as the legacy of his brief time at N.C. State – perhaps less as a quarterback than as a teammate. Even if it’s both.
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