T.A. McLendon looks back 20 years after scintillating NC State debut

T.A. McLendon says T.A. scored.

T.A. McLendon says T.A. should have stayed for his senior year.

T.A. McLendon says T.A.’s time at NC State were the best years of his life.

Finally, today’s T.A. McLendon says he has no great regrets, despite a truncated football career that always held great promise but was cut short by multiple injuries, maybe a few bad choices and an overall immaturity that kept him from reaching his full potential.

“I wouldn’t change a thing because they all made me the person I am,” he says. “I think I played football pretty well. I made some mistakes, but I grew from those mistakes.

“I am happy with where I am in life.”

Twenty years to the week after he first arrived in Raleigh to provide the strongest running weapon for quarterback Philip Rivers’ offensive attack, McLendon took a little time to reflect on his record-setting freshman season, the Wolfpack’s successful 2002 campaign that ended with a school record 11 wins and a three-year college career that always left him, his coach and Wolfpack football fans wondering what might have been had he not been sidelined so often by aches, pains, breaks and pulls, not to mention a tad bit of stubbornness.

“I always thought I could have been better if I had been healthy,” McLendon says.

McLendon is back living in his hometown of Albemarle, North Carolina, where he was a small-town hero during his high school days. He spends a fair amount of time traveling for work and finds it enjoyable.

Like many, he says it’s hard to believe that two decades have passed since he showed up for summer workouts at Carter-Finley Stadium, wondering if his small-town credentials would translate into big-time numbers at college football’s highest level.

No one ever doubted those early credentials, especially after he set several state scoring and rushing single-season and career records.

In the final high school game of his career, he scored seven touchdowns in a 66-28 victory over Wallace-Rose Hill in the I-AA championship game at UNC’s Kenan Stadium. In all, he scored 178 touchdowns in his career and 71 times as a senior, and ended with a state-record 8,959 career rushing yards.

 “T.A. was unbelievable,” says former head coach Chuck Amato, who considered McLendon an in-state coup in his third recruiting class. “He’d kill you. You just didn’t want to tackle his fanny. He would run over you, run around you, run on top of you or just outrun you. He was something.

“It’s just a shame he got hurt.”

Which time, coach?

“All of them,” he says.

McLendon was indeed the king of the training room, the ice bath and the hot tub, something that frustrated him and his coach to no end.

His freshman year, he suffered a broken wrist three weeks before the game against North Carolina, had surgery and came back to record two of the best games by a freshman running back in school history against the Tar Heels and at Clemson.

He suffered a bruised shoulder against Florida State in the regular-season finale and saw limited action in the Wolfpack’s 11th victory of the year, a 28-6 whipping of Notre Dame in the 2003 Toyota Gator Bowl, even though he scored two of the Wolfpack’s four touchdowns.

In the first season that bowl statistics counted toward NCAA records, McLendon rushed for 1,101 yards, and became the second player in school history to score in triple figures, with 108 points. He scored on 18 rushing touchdowns, a record that was tied by Reggie Gallaspy in 2018, but has never been surpassed.

McLendon didn’t top the 1,000-yard mark in his sophomore or junior seasons because of his myriad injuries, but he did gain a total of 1,378 yards on the ground those two years.

“My freshman year took such a toll on me,” he says. “I had so many injuries that I never had a chance to recover. I didn’t have one year where I was completely healthy. My body never had a chance to recover. I never had a season without injuries.”

Here’s the full rundown:

• Freshman season (2002): Suffered a broken wrist, but was able to return after surgery. Also sustained two separated shoulders later in the season and was knocked out of the Toyota Gator Bowl after being hit on one of his bruised shoulders.

Started eight of 13 games and was the fourth NC State player in five years to earn the league’s 2002 Freshman of the Year Award, following Ray Robinson (1998), Koren Robinson (1999) and Philip Rivers (2000).

• Sophomore season (2003): Missed the first four games of the season because of a pulled hamstring and missed time later in the season with a similar injury. Needed arthroscopic knee surgery, following an injury caused by getting out of his car on the way to class.

Played in only nine games, making six starts. He still led the team with 608 rushing yards on 130 carries with nine touchdowns.

• Junior season (2004): Hobbled by a preseason hamstring injury, McLendon was listed as fourth on the season-opening depth chart. He missed the Wolfpack’s opener and was hobbled through much of the season.

Still, he led the team in rushing for the third consecutive season with 770 yards on 167 carries with six touchdowns. He made nine starts in 10 games played.

“My freshman season did me in,” McLendon says with finality. “I was never myself again. No one ever got to see me play fully healthy. I feel bad about that.”

After the 2004 season, McLendon announced that he would give up his final year of eligibility to enter the NFL Draft, something Amato and others begged him not to do throughout his junior year.

“I told him, “T.A., I don’t want you to stay because I want you to help us win.’” Amato says. “’We have enough players, we will beat people. I want you to stay because you need to mature and you need to learn how to do things properly.'”

Years later, McLendon agrees with his former head coach.

“For the most part, it was a bad decision,” “McLendon admitted. “I should’ve come back, played my senior season, graduated and put myself in a better position to get drafted.”

McLendon was not selected by the NFL’s 32 franchises and was unable to sign a free-agent contract after several tryouts. Fifteen years later, McLendon says he’s comfortable with his career and his legacy.

“Not getting drafted and not playing professional football doesn’t define me,” he says. “It was a big part of my life, and I’m glad I got to play at the level I played in. Football is not the end-all, be-all. It gave me tools for life. You get knocked, and you have to get back up and be ready for the next fight. Whether you are hurt or not, you have to get back up.

“Football is a good life-game experience: you live life in quarters. That was the first quarter of my life.”

There is one thing McLendon will always be associated with: the 2004 game against North Carolina, in which he was awarded a touchdown with six seconds remaining in the game, but had it removed by an official on the other side of the field.

It’s a question that McLendon often answers before it’s even asked.

“There is no doubt I was in,” he says. “The rule says if any part of the ball, whether it is just the front tip or the whole ball, breaks the plane, it is a touchdown. How do you let an official from the other sideline overrule the one who was right there? How do you take points off the scoreboard, literally? How?

“I consider it a classic Carolina call.”

The play did, however, hasten changes in college football, with the ACC becoming one of several leagues to experiment with instant replay in conference games in 2005. The next year, the NCAA adopted instant replay for all Division I teams.

“Just being part of that play is still pretty awesome, even if I was on the bad end of it,” McLendon says. “Now we have instant replay and have for more than 15 years.”

Still, McLendon can’t help but think the outcome of the game — and the fortunes of the Pack’s 5-6 season — might have been different if he had been healthy.

“The big thing about that game was that I shouldn’t have been playing,” he says. “I had a hamstring injury. I was playing on one leg.

“It’s amazing how many games I played that I shouldn’t have played. That’s another thing I wish I had back.

“Because of the love of the game, the love of my teammates, that’s what made me do that. I put everything on the line every time I could. I was basically living in the moment.”

Those moments are long gone. McLendon still ranks among the best rushers and top scorers in NC State football history, despite all of his missed moments. He still shares the record of five rushing touchdowns in a single game, which he did on the road at Texas Tech his freshman season. For better or for worse, he’s still a locker room and training room legend.

The only thing that has really changed is that T.A. McLendon now prefers to be called Tristan, to get away from the initials that defined him during his college career as “Touchdown Anytime.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at [email protected].

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