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In a season defined by an implacable urge to self-destruct, NC State's 30-29 loss at Georgia Tech may have been the magnum opus, although there is still time. Plenty of complaints need filing, and everybody is entitled to their opinion, but this loss feels to me like a culmination of a year's worth of offensive mismanagement.
Robert Anae’s effort this season has ultimately failed this football team. By miles, the most successful thing NC State did on offense in Atlanta was run zone. The team put up 8.5 yards per carry from running back carries in zone plays. Bailey posted a putrid 4.9 yards per attempt. NC State had 39 dropbacks and ran 17 zone plays.
Its plan was to leave this game at the feet of a freshman quarterback, just as it did against Duke, a doomed proposal that left you in exactly the position you’d expect it to leave you. Despite a bunch of wrong people suggesting that it was in State’s best interest to throw the ball 80% of the time, the Pack offense’s only good game of the year came against Stanford, when it provided its young quarterback with a strong run game to support him. Bailey is not Peyton Manning, no matter how much people want him to be.
This stuff really isn’t rocket science. Having your freshman quarterback throwing the ball 40 times a game is not a recipe for success, and the Pack never trailed by enough in either of the last two games to justify this nonsense. Nevertheless, State’s solution to its run game problems from earlier in the year was to abandon the entire proposition. Over two-thirds of the play calls featured dropbacks.
State’s abandonment of the run game over the course of the season is high on a long list of inexplicable failures from the offensive staff. It never really sought a solution here after it tried to make Bailey the running back at Cal, a hideous kludge destined to blow up in their face that ultimately blew up in their face.
The offensive line was excellent in this game against a stout rush defense. Truly, it was fantastic. The backs were great, particularly Smothers and Raphael. CJ Bailey really struggled. Georgia Tech would routinely show zero blitz and then play different looks from that picture. Sometimes it would bring the house. Sometimes it would bail into a zone. Bailey does not like this. He had tons of trouble with it. If State was smarter about how it approached this game, it probably wins going away, and it probably comes in with this attitude if it wasn’t so willing to give up on the run at the first sign of trouble earlier in the season.
This was a botch job from the staff. That doesn’t just include Robert Anae. Tony Gibson sold this game at the end, and he did so the same way he sold the Wake Forest game; a total lack of interest in accounting for the legs of the quarterback. His insistence on playing cover 2 man in do-or-die scenarios for the defense, a coverage they don’t use that frequently otherwise, has cost State two separate games that it led in the final two minutes.
If you’ll join me on a journey back to the Wake Forest debacle, you may recall that State had the Demon Deacons in 4th and 9 with the football game on the line. The Pack played cover 2 man and twisted both interior pass rushers in a four-man rush. Man coverage has a natural weakness to the quarterback scramble because the coverage team has its backs to the quarterback. That’s one of the many reasons why teams so commonly play a rat player when they play man. When you play cover 2 man, that only leaves you with four players, and if you rush all of them, you risk just opening Broadway for the quarterback. Hank Bachmeier ran for a first down easily and State lost the game.
Fast forward to now, and you’ll see NC State doing exactly the same thing. Here are NC State’s play calls on the final drive.
1st and 10 at the 25 - Cover 2 man, rush 4
2nd and 4 at the 31 - Cover 2 man, rush 4
3rd and 2 at the 33 - Cover 3, rush 3, pre-snap disguised as 2-man
1st and 10 at 39 - Cover 2 man, rush 4
1st and 10 at the 44 - Cover 3, rush 3
2nd and 2 at the 36 - Cover 3, rush 3
1st and 10 at the 18 - Cover 2 man, rush 4
State had no interest whatsoever in challenging this quarterback, and it cleared a path for him with another cover 2 man call on the eventual touchdown. Here’s the play.
Bonner is the fourth rusher on these plays. You could have just played him as a spy player instead of adding the fourth rusher if you so desired. You have options with a 3-3-5, as opposed to a more traditional 4-3 where a cover 2 man look would give you no disposable players unless you wanted to drop an end. I think the part that baffles me the most is the touchdown, where State had just watched Aaron Philo scramble for a huge gain, knew Georgia Tech had a timeout left, and still went out and called what they did.
The worst part was what went to waste. The defense was actually fantastic for the whole game until the play calling sold it at the end. The rush defense was light years better than I could have dreamt they would look against this team. That entire unit, which did not give up a touchdown drive until the final 30 seconds, deserved so much better than this result.
A lot of elements of this team deserved a better result than they got. The offensive line was great. The run game was hot. Everything other than the pass game was on great footing for most of the night. It really is a masterpiece of coaching malpractice to lose a game where you averaged eight yards per carry, never fumbled, and didn’t give up a real offensive touchdown drive for over 59 minutes. This was a gem from the defense and the ground game that just got flushed down the toilet.
There is so much talent on this football team. It isn’t a conference title caliber team after all, especially not with a backup quarterback, but it isn’t a 5-6 team either. The way that State has defended the run the last two games, even without Davin Vann blowing things up in the second half on Thursday, is again proof that it has suffered from fixable issues. It’s one thing to get blown up by a run blocking unit. It’s another entirely to consistently misfit run plays. Thursday’s performance makes you wonder where this assignment-sound defense had been and why it took this long to find.
I don’t know what else to say about it. This season sucks. It’s been an abject failure from the offensive staff and the worst-coached season of Tony Gibson’s tenure by far. The team fell short of expectations from a personnel perspective, but even so, there is a world out there where it’s sitting at 8-3. Hopefully, State can beat UNC and end the year with a positive taste in its mouth. Regardless of that, there are some serious questions Doeren needs to answer about his staff.
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