Can Kurt Roper Commit to The Strengths of His Offense?

There were a lot of vocalized frustrations last season with NC State’s offense, a unit that was brimming with potential but largely fell on its face. Anae was shown the door as a result, and it’s hard to argue that management and play calling weren't chaos agents contributing to the unit’s dysfunctional nature. 

State certainly hit some snags during the season, some of which are hard to attribute to coaching. McCall’s struggles and injury are among them, but it was more than that. Running inside zone with Jordan Waters should have been a slam dunk. That did not happen. Waters wasn't good and the offense did not deliver on its base elements early in the season. Sometimes that’s what happens when humans play sports, but where coaches make their money is often in what they do in response to that, perfect example being how Robert Anae pivoted in response to the on-field play of his offense in 2023. 

Landing on counter bash as a keystone play and making major changes to the passing offense helped State to a 5-0 finish in the regular season. In 2024, a similar situation began to emerge and the staff responded poorly. Now, Doeren is hoping that Kurt Roper can construct something more conducive to success with these pieces. The Smothers usage stuff doesn’t need to be rehashed. Everybody was and still is sufficiently indignant about that. I want to talk more about managing the strengths and weaknesses of a team, something Anae seemed diametrically opposed to last season. 

Roper being the quarterback coach and having a strong relationship with CJ Bailey figures to be a plus. How the play calling managed Bailey was one of my biggest gripes. There was no effort to simplify the game for a young quarterback. He was treated like an advanced quarterback and, quite understandably, was not ready for that. The result was inconsistency, and even though Bailey was the one failing to execute at times, I wouldn’t blame him for the offense’s noncommittal nature.

State’s highest-volume passing concepts were really air raid staples that have populated across all of football, particularly after Bailey's first two games. Vertical concepts like four verticals, HOSS, and middle read were everywhere, and Bailey was wildly inconsistent in these concepts. The problem I have with this stuff is it puts a lot on a quarterback’s plate. When you run four verticals, there are five routes, there is no progression, and all five routes are in play. These are full-field reads that ask the quarterback to ID coverages pre-snap, confirm post-snap, and either attack a one-on-one matchup with ball placement or work a safety with his eyes and throw into a window in the seam. 

HOSS and middle read are cousins of four verts and contain a lot of the same elements. There is no progression to it, it’s a full-field read, and it’s fundamentally designed to stretch safeties horizontally. State calling stuff like this almost as many times as it called outside zone in certain games sent me into a splenetic rage. This is not how you manage a freshman quarterback, especially when you have a strong run game. All of this exists as a self-constructed obstacle before we even get to the insistence on using Bailey in the run game. I do understand the grave nature of where State was before Smothers was healthy. It was trying to solve multiple problems, but it never showed intent to have an identity other than throwing vertical concepts a lot. It became a zone team basically out of necessity as it continued its search for ways to be other things.  

It seemed to almost ignore its own strengths. This is, of course, why Dave Doeren politely asked Robert Anae to update his resume. It’s also in contrast to how State coached Brennan Armstrong. The Pack did like the HOSS concept with Armstrong, but it was a run-first team that heavily relied on free access and used a lot of half-field reads and pocket movement to simplify the passing game. This made the ceiling of the passing game a little bit lower, but State was never approaching a high ceiling at that time anyway. The passing game was again limited by the personnel in 2024, but this time, State opted out of reality. 

Florida, another school that started a freshman quarterback, faced a lot of the same questions and offered up much better answers. This is the kind of stuff State should, in my opinion, incorporate more, at least until its strengths define themselves differently. DJ Lagway had his freshman issues, but Florida ran the football and then set up these simpler reads off play action. It’s commonplace on his tape. 

1. Jet motion helps Lagway ID man vs. zone (this is obviously zone) 

2. Play action 7-man protection with a check-and-release for the back

3. Check the safety, hi-lo the mike backer, check it down. Three steps, minimal ambiguity

While the quarterback is checking the seam route here, it's almost never thrown, especially against a MOFC look. It's functionally a grab route. Barring a bust, this play is really a hi-lo read and a check down. It's very simple. State had a similar play, albeit with a little more going on, that I termed "HOSS-Bow," but it ran it just five or six times all year, usually with no play action.

This is the kind of play that combines simplification for your quarterback with a series-based philosophy that builds out from a run game, a pretty basic and common philosophy in football that was available to NC State last year, but largely rejected. 

Roper needs to do a better job than Anae did of setting his quarterback up for success. To me, this starts with the run game and Daylan Smothers. Now, it’s a question mark if State can approach the effectiveness it ran the ball with at the end of last season. Smothers is a star, but State has to replace Anthony Belton and Zeke Correll, the two best run blockers on the line. It’s hard to say specifically how Roper could go about this, but I'll stress that I'm not clamoring for a specific offensive approach so much as an ability to identify and build around the things you're good at. We'll see how certain returnees develop and how new guys fit in, but in general, I want him to lean on the strengths of his players and team. 

If State can run the ball effectively again, Roper is in a position to lean on the run game and ask less of his quarterback. If his quarterback takes a big step forward, then that’s all the better. It depends on how the personnel plays out, but generally, this is what I mean. Establish your identity. If you’re going to be a zone team, be a zone team. Then you can build toward your quarterback’s strengths from there. If you want to be more multiple in the run game, that's great, but don't insist on G/H counter bash if you can't block it and your quarterback can't run it. The game is played by people, not robots. Just because something schematically makes sense doesn't mean your players are comfortable doing it.

I encourage everyone to go back and rewatch the second half of the UNC game, and not just because beating UNC is fun. It's a good example of simplifying the passing concepts, leaning on the run game, and using the best parts of your offense to set up opportunities for explosives. It was not spaghetti being thrown at the wall. Interestingly, State scored on every possession in that half of football. This is what we want to see from Roper in 2025.