Winning and Regionalism

This editorial argued that as long as the football team won games, no one would notice where the players were from.

Some did not hesitate to say that the only thing the football team had to do to promote spirit and a strong sense of collective identity among students and alumni was to win games. An editorial in a local newspaper illustrated how some felt that questions of regional identity would disappear as long as the football team won games consistently. The editorial observed that alumni argued that no one objected to Northern players at Duke and North Carolina, where teams had winning seasons. From this point of view, complaints about Northerners on the team really just reflected alumni’s unhappiness with the fact that their alma mater had an unsuccessful football team. As historian Pamela Grundy has observed, by the 1930s “intercollegiate athletics became one of the major centers of both campus life and state society.” Being able to identify with a winning football team was an important point of pride for NC State’s alumni.