Since before this season started, I thought NC State was a 7-5 football team, and nothing that happened through five games challenged that thought. There was, however, a period of time during Saturday’s loss to Wake Forest where the Wolfpack threatened to turn a corner. CJ Bailey’s record-setting performance against Louisville seemed to have carried over, the defense was shutting down the run game, making the Deacs one dimensional, and NC State was dominating the game.
When Wake Forest punted with just under seven minutes to go in the second quarter, it had amassed 27 total yards. NC State had scored on back-to-back drives of over 70 yards, including a 96-yard drive. CJ Bailey was 15/15. It was clicking. The lead was only 14-7 because of another ball security gaffe, a classic case of enabling the opponent through mistakes, but State had the ball back with a chance to put some serious game pressure on Wake Forest.
NC State’s next five drives totaled 45 yards of offense. Wake would score 31 points and rack up 360 yards over its next five drives. This one changed so fast, and Wake was so dominant over that stretch, that the first two quarters of the game now seem like they were played in a parallel universe.
The whole thing really started to cave in after halftime, and the third frame here was among the worst efforts I’ve seen from NC State in some time. DJ Eliot’s defense racked up multiple procedural penalties, alignment errors, and miscommunications in coverage. The offensive line, or what’s left of it, was not great in the first half, but it held its own. In the second half, Wake’s simple TEX stunts were suddenly creating havoc for pass protection. Bailey was rushed into a lot of checkdowns as a result. Already lacking any real run game, the wheels started coming off the wagon as Wake added game pressure to an offense that couldn’t run the ball and couldn’t pass protect well enough to attack downfield.
This was the concept that created the two longest plays of the game for Wake Forest.
Wake loves to move the pocket, as many teams with athletic quarterbacks do. It had run some sort of sprint out three or four times already. Here it’s going to pull the guard and fake the sprint out, then run a post-dig combo back the other way with some sort of underneath control route to the weak side.
In both instances, the fake sprint out gets the middle safety to open his hips and work that way, and the post route going to the weak side is able to cross his face. The first clip is cover 1, and you can see Jaren Sensabaugh playing with outside leverage because his help is that safety in the middle. He’s not wrong there, but he does get toasted. The second clip is cover 3, and the same thing happens to the safety.
State struggled with the mesh concepts in the second half as well, which Wake was happy to exploit a few different times. This defense has many mechanisms to handle crossing routes throughout its menu of coverages, but it hasn’t been a defense that has communicated at a particularly high level the last two years, and this is one area where you see it.
Offensively, this crippled offensive line proved an issue, but even the starters didn’t play well. The left side was Teague Andersen and Jimarion McCrimon, the only two starters available, and they were beaten multiple times by two-man games from Wake Forest.
This is called a TEX stunt. Wake will have its B gap player or 3-tech, which is usually the defensive tackle in normal-down fronts, shoot the B gap. The edge player will loop over him into the A gap. It’s a very common pass rush game.
This is just not handled well. Both linemen chase their original assignments, no exchange occurs, and the looper is free to the quarterback.
This one is handled a little better, but you still end up with the penetrator coming clean through the B gap when Andersen tries to hand him off to McCrimon. That, combined with Rico Jackson giving ground on the speed-to-power move, forces Bailey up in the pocket, but Andersen is losing the edge while picking up the looper and Bailey walks right into it. These were just not handled well by the Wolfpack.
The backups really struggled too. Trent Mitchell had a rough day, but it’s hard to get too annoyed about that when he’s the eighth lineman. The starters having a bad day is different, especially when both have played well pretty much all season.
Final Thoughts
Every game is not an indictment of the staff or the program or the status of the world around us. That is a sick way to live. But this one kind of feels like it is. There is never an excuse to lose to Wake Forest by 24 points at home ever under any circumstances, especially not a Wake Forest team that’s modestly funded at best. Jake Dickert is trotting out a former South Alabama quarterback who washed out at UNC, and this guy is throwing the ball around like an All-ACC candidate.
State is just not getting that level of value from its roster construction, and that’s been the case since its first major portal build in 2024. The Pack is now 9-14 against power five teams since the start of 2024. It’s also 5-1 against G5 teams, but with an average margin of just +9. Unless NC State finishes 5-1, it will fail to win eight regular-season games for the third straight year.
That is decline, just mathematically speaking. Prior to 2024, NC State won eight regular-season games six times in seven years, and nine in three of those years. The last time it went three straight years without an eight-win regular season was 2014-2016. It all illustrates a leveling down within the ACC in the portal/NIL era, and getting pasted by Wake Forest the year after Duke won the ACC just runs a highlighter over the curable afflictions that hamper the Wolfpack.
This swirling mass of inconvenient truths has really turned the heat up on Doeren, and even if State were to get to 8-4, I’m not sure that would change the opinion of the growing mass of people who feel like the program has yet to make headway on solving this era. Actually, I’m sure it wouldn’t. It’s a shame, because Dave Doeren is a good football coach and an objectively good human, and I will always feel like he deserved an ACC title during that 2017-2023 stretch, when he was constantly on the doorstep. But this year’s team was never a contender, and something serious would have to break way to reach that status again.