2024 Was Not a Well-Coached Season

I prefer to have coaching discussions at the end of the season. There is a small section of the fanbase, and probably every fanbase, that’s just bloodthirsty all the time. Their general dipshittery makes nuanced discussions of coaching hard to have, but it’s still important to try. I always make an effort to watch the whole year play out before I evaluate the larger situation, and now that it’s come to an end with State’s perfunctory bowl performance, it’s time to evaluate the whole thing. 

This was not a well-coached football team. It just wasn’t. There were some happenings over the course of the season that were outside of the staff’s control, but a lot that were inside of their control that simply never improved or were not rectified with appropriate urgency. This was not a good year for the staff. 

Doeren is really the program’s CEO. He doesn’t call plays on either side. He’s involved, as you would want your head coach to be, but he’s the program’s executive. That means two things. The first is that individual screw ups are not a direct product of his decision making most of the time. The second is that he is ultimately responsible for everything that happens, period. You can see why that makes a game-by-game analysis of the head coach kind of stupid and hard to conduct without making assumptions and why a full-season analysis may provide a better picture. 

I’ve been a Doeren fan for a long time. He should have won coach of the year in 2020 and it was a total sham that he didn’t. He had a case in 2023 as well, but there were certainly more formidable contenders than in 2020. Tony Gibson has been a magician for State since he joined the staff, and Robert Anae executed an offensive turnaround in 2023 that was quite impressive. This group worked some magic last year. I don’t understand how such coachable elements of the 2024 team went so sideways, but they did. 

The mental mistakes from veteran players will be hard for me to ignore. I can live with CJ Bailey's inconsistency. That's a lot easier to stomach than senior running backs failing to read a zone play correctly and senior linebackers and safeties unable to fit the run. I don’t have unrealistic expectations about how NC State should match up with Clemson. The Tigers have more talent, and if State struggles to win at the line of scrimmage, I can live with that. I'll be disappointed, but I can understand how you got there. The Pack’s propensity to constantly misfit the run is something else entirely. You do not have complete control over who wins when a kickout block meets a linebacker on a counter play, but you have absolute control over where you are on the field before that happens. 

The defense was riddled with run busts this year. This part is just unacceptable, especially when they involve senior mike linebackers. How does this happen so often? I don’t understand it at all, but it was one of the most glaring issues the team had to wade through all season. It wasn’t until the 10th game that we saw any real improvement. 

On the other side of the ball, the offensive management and play calling just grinded you down as a supporter. If you want to know how State lost the Military Bowl to an aspiring mediocrity from the group of five, look no further than the zero (0) third quarter touches for Hollywood Smothers, who had been the offense’s best player since the Stanford game. 

This offense has insisted on running the quarterback and throwing the ball at a high rate. Bailey either ran or threw the ball on 37 plays against ECU, while the backs carried the ball 23 times. The backs averaged nearly eight yards per carry. The Georgia Tech game is the most grotesque example of this, where Bailey had 39 dropbacks at 4.9 yards per attempt and State’s backs carried the ball 16 times for 8.5 yards per attempt. If State trusted its zone game a little more, it might very well have won two extra games in the regular season. 

Like it or not, Bailey’s season was a very freshman experience. He had high highs and low lows, and that’s the nature of it. Anae’s interest in making him the focal point of everything was a misstep. It makes no sense. State’s best offensive sequences were when it leaned on its zone game and built offense out of that. The second half against UNC was a quintessential example of building offense out from a productive run game. How do you come out of halftime in the bowl game with Smothers averaging nearly 10 yards per carry and not allow him to run a zone play the whole third quarter? State routinely looked at six-man boxes from 11 personnel and did not run the football.

The offensive management this season was disastrous, putting too much on a freshman quarterback that wasn’t up for a lot of it. The Pack chose training by fire. It was never conservative in its play calling, especially not if you operate under the faulty assumption that running the ball equals conservative. It was a vertical passing offense basically starting with the Syracuse game, when the Pack began leaning heavily into horizontal safety stretching concepts like four verticals, middle read, and HOSS. Sometimes it looked less willing to attack downfield because of Bailey's reliance of the check down, and maybe there is something to be said about how that was managed. It's squarely within the realm of possibility considering the staff's commitment to winning the turnover battle. Regardless, it wasn't that the play calling was too conservative. It was just that it was really bad.

State wanted to put its weight on its rookie quarterback, a relatively easy proposition to poke holes in. Even when it sought to run the ball, it ran some form of Q counter or QB draw about a quarter of the time. The only thing about the play calling that was conservative was the number of plays called. State was bottom ten in the country in pace. It was clearly intent on shortening the game, and if you don’t care for that approach, that’s fine. It’s a structural preference and you’re entitled to your opinion on it. The bigger issue to me was the personnel and identity inconsistencies and the commitment to playing away from your strengths. How does Jordan Waters get twice as many touches as Smothers against Duke? How do you call this many bash read plays with Bailey, who has overtly failed at reading blocking leverage time and again and even noted that he has had to develop this skill rapidly during the season? 

So State finishes 6-7 with four one-possession losses, at least two of which it should have won without needing a barnburner finish. The highlight of the year was beating a crappy UNC team, and that’s only because we hate them. It holds no other value. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed that, but it’s an indictment of very little. The season as a whole is a bust, and it truthfully would be regardless of the bowl result, but the bowl result was just a fitting exclamation point to earn. 

Dave Doeren, contrary to the narratives, has evolved a number of times during his lengthy tenure in Raleigh. He came in running a 4-3 base defense, shifted to a 4-2 to adapt to more spacing-based offenses, and then moved again to a tite front 3-3 team to combat spread and RPO-heavy offenses. This objectively worked. He changed the recruiting strategy for DBs, which helped fix State’s issues at corner that plagued it during the late 2010s. There are lots of examples, and now it’s time to do it again.

It needs to move on from Robert Anae and make a new hire at both coordinator spots. The offensive outlook has potential, but it needs a better approach. The defensive outlook is less appealing. Davin Vann was the football team’s best player and the last face from the insane front that made up the dominant 2022 defense. The talent level isn’t the same right now, and Doeren needs to hire a defensive coordinator and figure out the solution to that. 2019 was an inflection point for the program, and State navigated that beautifully. The entirety of the talent that made up those teams is gone, as is the defensive coordinator. We're now at another inflection point. You’re up, Dave.