Best college football coach in history from each state

North Carolina: Wallace Wade

North Carolina is more known in the sports world for being a basketball powerhouse, but Wade brought some brief football glory to Duke.

Wade played college football at Brown as a guard and was part of the 1916 team that advanced all the way to the Rose Bowl. Following two years of service in the Army, Wade received his first head coaching gig at Fitzgerald and Clarke Military School before moving to Vanderbilt as an assistant coach.

Alabama hired Wade two years later, and he went on to win three national championships with the Crimson Tide between 1923 and 1930. Shockingly, Wade quit his job at Alabama the offseason after winning a title to move to Duke, which had little tradition as a football program at that point in its history.

By the third year of the Wade era, Duke won the Southern Conference with a mark of 9-1, setting off a streak of nine consecutive seasons with a 7-2 record or better including two appearances in the Rose Bowl. Duke enjoyed its best season ever at 9-1 with a second place finish in the AP Poll in 1941, and Wade finished his tenure at Duke with an 110-36-7 record despite struggling in the immediate years after World War II.

The Blue Devils haven’t enjoyed that sort of success since, although current head coach David Cutcliffe has successfully rescued the program from bottom-feeder status over the past five years. No major program in North Carolina has ever claimed a national title, although coaches like Dick Crum, Mack Brown and Lou Holtz have brought some football glory to the state.