Four years ago, Greg Haas broke his right leg in two places after jumping down from Carter-Finley’s eight-foot walls to rush the field following NC State’s thrilling win against UNC-Chapel Hill.
After NC State’s recent domination over then-No. 8 Georgia Tech, Haas, with rod and screws now in his leg, found himself unable to resist the pull of the field again at his fiftieth game in a row. This time around, he slid down the student section’s 3-foot wall with more caution and some help from a fellow fan.
Although there have only been three field stormings in the last two decades, field stormings haven’t always been rare at NC State.
Jeremy Ashton, alumnus and former Technician sports editor, reported on NC State’s overtime victory and subsequent field rush against Georgia Tech in 2000. He remembers the broader context as clearly as the final score. Head coach Chuck Amato had just arrived from Florida State, bringing with him a top 10 pedigree and the status of an alum returned home. Philip Rivers, a true freshman who had enrolled early, was quickly becoming a folk hero for the Wolfpack.
The season had already delivered two chaotic comebacks — a double-overtime win against Arkansas State and a last-minute victory at Indiana, ending with a blocked field goal — by the time preseason-ranked No. 15 Georgia Tech came to Raleigh for a Thursday night game on ESPN, Ashton said.
Once Rivers found fellow future NFL first-round pick Koren Robinson with a 23-yard touchdown on the second play of overtime, Ashton said the decision in the stands was immediate.
“You kind of just knew the goal posts were going to come down,” Ashton said.
Two years later, in 2002, the Wolfpack toppled No. 2 Florida State at home, prompting what many, including Ashton and Tim Peeler, university communications specialist, still consider the program’s signature field storm of the modern era. Both field posts came down. Athletics later cut them into pieces and sold them off, with at least one chunk still hanging at Amedeo’s Italian Restaurant.
NC State’s history of field rushing stretches back even further. Peeler said the school’s record of storming fields and tearing down posts goes back to at least the 1940s, including students pouring onto the grass at Riddick Stadium after a 3-0 win over Florida State in 1965, the last game played in the old on-campus facility, near where SAS Hall stands today.
Historic tradition or not, rushing the field has always come with costs. Peeler, also a Technician alum, said that by the 1980s, Technician was already questioning whether repeated storms were worth the price of new goalposts.
“There was an editorial in 1998 when they stormed the field in three out of four games spanning two seasons, and it cost $6,000 to replace a goal post at that time,” Peeler said. “They were bemoaning the fact that [$36,000] — how much could you buy student scholarship-wise, equipment-wise? Was that just a waste of money for the athletics department to keep paying those fees and the implicit danger of taking the field and at that time, tearing down the goal post?”
Nobody forced NC State to rethink the risks more than East Carolina. In 1987, after ECU beat the Wolfpack in Raleigh, Pirates fans stormed the field and tore down both goalposts at Carter-Finley. Peeler, then a student, saw the shift in mood from excitement to danger.
“When East Carolina took a significant lead early in the second half, I looked at my girlfriend at the time and said, we’re getting out of here because this is going to turn bad — and it did,” Peeler said. “[We] spent the next two weeks doing nothing but writing about what happened after that game; it was really crazy.”
Multiple fights broke out between fans and campus security, and dozens of people were injured. Most notably, an NC State police officer was struck in the face while trying to pull a fan off a goalpost. His glasses were shattered, and fragments lodged in his eye. He was later treated and released with no permanent damage.
The consequences were serious. Athletics Director Jim Valvano effectively froze the rivalry for five years, but when ECU returned to Carter-Finley in 1999 for a relocated home game against Miami after Hurricane Floyd, their fans again stormed the field and tore down the posts.
In 2004, NC State installed collapsible goalposts that staff can lower after games, making them harder to climb and easier to protect.
The Nov. 1 rush was NC State’s first under the ACC’s new fine structure for field and court storming. Beginning this season, schools that allow fans onto the playing surface immediately after the clock hits zero are fined with $50,000 for a first offense, with penalties escalating for repeats.
Andrea Adelson, who covers the ACC for ESPN and ACC Network, said the fines actually grew out of basketball incidents last season, not football in particular.
“They were very high-profile games in which fans tangled with some of the players,” Adelson said. “ … I think the ACC was really wanting to try and take a stand on that because it was alarming that the fans and the players kind of got mixed up a little bit, and it’s really about player safety in the mind of the ACC.”
Although the fine has been instituted, Adelson said this season has brought the most field rushes in recent memory in the conference, with six overall so far. Adelson herself was present for Florida State’s rush after beating No. 4 Alabama in its first game of the season, and SMU’s overtime victory against No. 15 Miami.
“I just think this is a unique year for it to be playing itself out in the ACC in particular, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that fines are now in place,” Adelson said. “I don’t think fans care or realize in most instances. I don’t think fans are thinking, ‘my school might get fined $50,000. I’m just gonna sit right here in my seat when they’re that excited, or they see other people storming the field. So I’m not really sure what is an effective deterrent, quite honestly, because they instituted this and it hasn’t stopped in football.”
Haas agrees that institutional fines alone will not stop a rush once a notable win is secured.
“Honestly, the only way you’re going to stop it is if you start arresting people,” Haas said. “Because there has to be a determinant. The $50,000 fine is not going to stop people because it’s not coming directly out of their pocket.”
Haas said he believes the fine exists to protect players and visiting teams more than to keep fans in their seats.
“I’m okay with the $50,000 fine personally because you don’t want to see anything negatively happen with the school and the other team,” Haas said.
Haas, who now goes by “Greg the Leg” among NC State fans, said he tried to walk away from the field rushing after his injury but could not resist the feeling of being part of something bigger than himself.
“I mean, it was just a pure rush of adrenaline,” Haas said of the UNC game. “You just go and don’t even, again, like I said, just throwing caution to the wind.”
In his view, Haas said the rush is reserved for moments that matter.
“It’s the magnitude of the moment, the game — the opponent kind of means something,” Haas said. “When we rushed the field in ‘21 against Carolina, people thought it was kind of stupid, but it was just something that, because of what happened, how we got to that moment … But you scored two touchdowns in the last minute and 45 seconds to win the game like that.”
Even in an era of fines, collapsible goalposts and 8-foot stadium walls, that impulse has not changed.
“Nobody gave NC State a chance, right? I mean, people had already written off Dave Doeren, and we’re talking about whether he was going to be around for next season,” Adelson said. “And so, again, the euphoria of that moment, having won a game like that, when everyone’s counting you out, it felt like, yeah, they’re going to definitely storm the field in that instance.”
For Haas, that euphoria is tied to NC State’s identity just as much as the scores from the games in which it takes place.
“NC State is one of those sporting communities where we don’t have a large fan base like some of these other schools, but what we lack in size, we have in heart and passion,” Haas said. “And to me, that’s the best part of being an NC State fan.”
