SAN DIEGO — From the top of N.C. State’s hotel, the expanse of San Diego spread out before the Wolfpack, from the open horizon of the Pacific to the distant hills of Mexico across the border to the airplanes that seem to slice between buildings on their way through downtown to land.
The supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln looms just across the channel, in the same berth where the USS Carl Vinson once served as a spectacular setting for a college basketball game 10 years ago. Swanky Coronado Island beckons, while the paths that run along the harbor just below the hotel bustle with people and beckon for a stroll.
By the end of a long Christmas week in San Diego, the Wolfpack had fully absorbed the natural beauty that has drawn people to this little pocket of the California coast for centuries.
A football team that came a long way this season has truly come a long way at the end of it.
Tuesday’s Holiday Bowl against UCLA — which, knock on wood, could end up being one of the very few bowl games the ACC actually plays — will come at the end of a long week of experiences the Wolfpack players, and this is not an exaggeration, will never forget, regardless of the result. A year after COVID turned last year’s Gator Bowl into a two-day trip, these festivities took the players to all of San Diego’s top sights, and not just as spectators but deep behind the scenes.
At the San Diego Zoo, they fed a rhinoceros by hand. Dolphins leapt into the air with a wave of their hands at Sea World. They roamed the decks of a Navy helicopter carrier, interacting with the sailors living and working aboard. Tuesday night, they’ll become part of a very small group of football players to have competed on the San Diego Padres’ field at Petco Park, which hosts only this one football game each year.
Many saw the Pacific for the first time, a reminder of just how long a journey this truly has been.
“I’ve never been on this side,” N.C. State back Trent Pennix said. “This is my first time in California. It’s just cool to see the west side of the country compared to the east side. I can really see a little difference. This is pretty cool, all the boys saying this being their first time here.”
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The Wolfpack is the first ACC team to make this trip, to a bowl game that — like the Sun Bowl, in El Paso — exists on a different, more traditional plane than most. The Holiday Bowl is a relic of the old days, when being the host was almost as important as being the participant, when the locals always bought enough tickets that the real priority was showing everyone a good time and showing off the city.
Nothing against, say, going to a bowl game in Charlotte, where you do get to take a lap in a stock car and it’s far easier for friends and family to attend, but the convenience is the draw, not the novelty. For a team of players who largely grew up in and around North Carolina, that’s a business trip.
This is an adventure. A rhino-feeding, dolphin-training, cross-country adventure.
“They told me it was going to be a small rhino, you know? I thought like 80 pounds,” N.C. State center Grant Gibson said. “So we go up there and this thing comes up by the wall. Boom, boom, the ground starts to shake. It’s this 4,000-pound rhino that’s 5 years old. So just to see it that close, that’s something like, I’ll be a grown man, and say I got to feed a rhino.”
“I loved the dolphins,” Pennix said. “I’ve never seen a dolphin up close, only seen them on TV. The trainers let us feed the dolphins. Throw the little fish in their mouths. It was actually pretty fun.”
It’s easy to understand why fans were disappointed that the Wolfpack didn’t end up in Orlando or Jacksonville, bowl games with some prestige and destination appeal but still easily driveable while airfares to San Diego reached four figures. This one isn’t for the fans. It’s for the players, their reward at the end of a successful if ultimately frustrating season that saw Wake Forest play for an ACC title instead.
All things considered bowl-wise, especially with Rutgers replacing Texas A&M in the Gator Bowl, the Wolfpack ended up with the better trip.
“Guys on our team, including me, we haven’t been to the West Coast,” Gibson said. “Just for us to get the chance to come out here as a team and play as a group one last time, it’s been a great week for us. We’ve enjoyed it the whole time.”
The Holiday Bowl was traditionally the home of the WAC champion back in the old days, where LaVell Edwards’ wide-open BYU teams would complete their high-scoring seasons at the now-departed Jack Murphy Stadium, consigned to dust with the Chargers’ departure for Los Angeles. After that, it became a meeting of second-best Pac-12, Big 12 and Big Ten teams, a West Coast version of the Citrus or Peach bowls, among the top of the second tier before the onset of the CFP reshuffled things.
This is a new bowl option for the ACC, which has lacked any California destination since 2010, although Florida State played in CFP games in Pasadena in the 2012 and 2013 seasons. COVID wiped out what would have been the ACC’s inaugural appearance last year.
It’s the farthest west N.C. State has gone since the 1989 Copper Bowl in Tucson — a literal home game for Arizona, which won — and the Wolfpack is the first Triangle team to play a bowl game in California since Duke in the 1938 Rose Bowl. The Blue Devils’ other Rose Bowl appearance was, famously, a home game thanks to World War II.
And it’s N.C. State’s first trip to California in 61 years. The Wolfpack traveled west to face UCLA in 1959 and 1960, losing both games and leaving a little unfinished business for Tuesday, only a few generations later.
Accordingly, by Sunday night, the Wolfpack’s attention had returned almost entirely to football, at the end of a long week of wide-eyed tourism. There was still fun to be had, though, as players howled karaoke, played pop-a-shot and cornhole and got touched up by the free barber in their ballroom-turned-lounge ahead of an early curfew.
As the speakers struggled to handle the “singing,” it was clear that this might not have been the bowl N.C. State wanted, but it turned out to be every bit the bowl N.C. State deserved.
