Game Analysis: NC State Clobbers Stanford

It's unclear exactly what happened to NC State between the 3rd and 4th quarter in Berkeley two weeks ago, but the Pack is up 73-28 over the last five quarters and it has simply looked like a different football team. It doesn't need to be said that the 59-28 win over Stanford was the best game of the year and felt wildly out of left field.

Before November 2nd, State had played five games against power conference teams. It scored first in zero of them. It led at the half in zero of them. It held a multi-score lead for a total of 4:25, which came in a game that was ultimately lost. The largest lead the Pack has held all year against any team was the final margin of 17 points against Western Carolina.

None of those things are true anymore after this game. Stanford stinks, clearly, but NC State has stunk pretty hard to this point as well. This contest proving itself to be one-sided to such a degree was shocking. Parts of the offense had been close, but being close for eight straight games doesn't give you a lot of hope that those pieces will ever come together. Every single one did against the Cardinal. 59 points is the most ever scored by NC State in an ACC game.

The Run Game Pops 

State ran for 281 yards on Saturday, and it managed this by doing largely the same thing it’s done all year. With a heavy dose of inside and outside zone (and thankfully zero designed carries for the quarterback), State put out a dominant team effort in the run game. Let’s start with the offensive line. I know this has been a point of contention all year, but the line has been solid for most of the season. They aren’t world-beaters, but a B grade is fair. These five guys were never close to the offense’s biggest issue, but they did play their worst game of the year at Cal. Against the Cardinal, the unit played its best game of the year and also got the benefit of the best game of the year from the backs. The result was kind of just embarrassing for Stanford. 

We’ll look at some line tape in a second, but the biggest change was the running back play. Early in the year, State’s backs were bad. This is particularly true for Jordan Waters. The backs could gain however many yards were effectively blocked for them, but that was it. The broken tackles that create explosive plays seemed to be a myth. As the season progressed, I thought the running backs started to overthink things, missing reads and making the whole process even less effective. Daylan Smothers brought new life to the position, and he was great on Saturday. Waters was also excellent, and he deserves the credit for finding himself after a disappointing first two-thirds of the year. 

Let's look at State’s two explosive touchdown runs, the first a 52-yarder and the second a 94-yarder. Both runs feature at least one missed tackle. Pay close attention to where these occur and consider the difference in the result without that missed tackle. 

Inside zone with Daylan Smothers here. He's going to score a 52-yard touchdown.

First, the double team from Correll and Carter, center and left guard, is destructive. Look at where that first contact is and where the defender ends up. Kamen Smith, who is in at right guard, and Peak double the other tackle. 35 for Stanford attacks the A gap, and Smith is a little late getting off the double team to the linebacker, but he does a decent job preventing the mistake from evolving into a catastrophe. The penetration forces Smothers to the back side, where the unblocked edge player is there. He gets his arms on Smothers at the 50, two yards down the field. Smothers breaks the tackle and gets 50 extra yards and six points. Also, look at Dante Daniels, an oft-criticized tight end having his best game. 

You cannot block every defender. That is simple math. Forcing this play to the back side and toward the unassigned edge defender is good for Stanford, but explosives come from broken tackles. This is what State was not getting earlier in the year. Smothers gets a big one here. As I’ve said before, a broken tackle is not always the difference between two yards and six yards. It’s often the difference between two yards and 52 yards. 

Here’s an even better example.

This truthfully isn’t even that great of a play from the line. Waters is going to break two tackles. The first guy gets his hands on him at the line of scrimmage. That’s a zero-yard gain with no broken tackles. The second guy gets his hands on him nine yards down the field. That’s probably a first-down run with one broken tackle. With two, it’s 94 yards. State broke 24 tackles in the game. Its previous high for the season was 12. Shoutout to these guys.

When you combine strong running back play with this type of performance from the offensive line, you get these 200+ yard games. The offensive line was just manhandling this defense. I know Stanford is awful but this was just domination all over the place. 

So let's talk about the guys up front, who owned the Cardinal defensive front. This is another inside zone play with Smothers.

State is going to get a bust here from Collins (4), who should be blocking that edge player that eventually makes the tackle. They wouldn't leave an edge unblocked in the direction they are running. That soils the play, but watch the left side of the line. Anthony Carter(75) at left guard and Zeke Correll(56) at center are supposed to double the defensive tackle and drive him toward the mike linebacker. This will happen right in the middle of your screen. Anthony Belton is ultimately going to be responsible for the other linebacker. Correll and Carter get an A++ here. The defensive tackle is six yards downfield by the end of the play, at which point they're able to separate the double and block the linebacker. Belton does a good job of getting back to the linebacker aftey they shift, and he gets great drive. Look at the hole that forms.

Here is the first of Jordan Waters' touchdowns.

It's another inside zone play. Watch Anthony Belton(74) at left tackle and Anthony Carter(75) at left guard. They are supposed to double team that end (number ends with a 4) and drive him to the linebacker. You cannot do better than this. The poor guy is four yards downfield when Belton gets off the double and eliminates the linebacker. It's also worth noting the great anchor from Correll at center. He gets stood up at first but is able to anchor in and turn that into a stalemate.

It's yet another inside zone play and yet another destruction.

You get a couple effective double teams on the front side. Correll and McKay in the middle move the nose tackle a full three yards. State gets Smothers to the unassigned player but he can't break the tackle. I think his decision is late by just a bit, and it makes it harder for him to get outside of that defender.

It was so much fun to see this stuff come together finally. State ran wild on the ground in this game. Thankfully, it never abandoned a run game that was statistically useless but showed potential on tape, and it was rewarded for such a choice. Offensive line gets an A+ for everything other than that one goal line series. The running backs get very high marks as well. I did not think Smothers was perfect from a read perspective, but he made up for any plays left on the field and then some with the plays he did make. He was dynamite.

CJ Bailey is good 

I said on the podcast two weeks ago that my expectations for the young quarterback were low, and that week-to-week improvement was the goal. Week-to-week improvement has been achieved, and at an expedited rate. I could title a section “CJ Bailey’s best game” in every one of these articles. This was, once again, his best game. 

Bailey has improved in a lot of ways since his first game. His eyes are better. His ability to layer the ball into coverage is better. His ball placement flashed a bit in this game. His pocket presence was better. These are all things he was not doing particularly well earlier this year. 

These are the passing concepts referenced in this section.

Let’s start here, with this four verticals play on 3rd and 10. This was the only four verticals call all game, and it’s a big-time play from the young quarterback.

State jet motions KC, and Bailey is reading zone when nobody from the defense runs with him. Stanford has one high safety, so you’re thinking cover 3 is likely here, especially since Stanford played a ton of it. Stanford ends up playing man on the field side and distributing the safeties and corners like base cover 3 on the boundary side, which is super weird. I have no idea what this is supposed to be, but they did it a lot. There are not many instances of divorced coverages like this where you still play a middle safety. It would make more sense if the safety cheated toward Jackson faster, but he doesn't. You’ve confused me, Stanford, but unfortunately, I’m a guy on the internet, and the guy you actually wanted to confuse seemed unbothered. 

Bailey looks at the safety post-snap, confirms that he’s in the middle third, and then gets to the short side where he has KC and Keenan Jackson on a switch vertical concept. The corner zones to his third but is tight to the boundary, the safety doesn’t cheat toward either slot vertical, and the hook player doesn’t carry Jackson, so a window opens. 

Window throws against a zone have been one of the bugaboos with Bailey. He’s looked hesitant to deliver them, allowing the window to close and the play to then break down. Not this time. He layers this in perfectly to Jackson. It’s well-timed, it’s accurate, and it’s confident. You can see the wheels are really starting to turn now on some of this stuff. This is his second-best throw of the year on a four verticals concept. 

I wanted to highlight this touchdown to Jackson.

Jackson is the real deal. He’s a point-of-catch guy in the Emeka Emezie mold, and State is a believer in it. There is a reason why he was the focal point of a lot of the formation-into-boundary concepts Anae used earlier in the year. State wants to get him into one-on-ones, and it did, but Bailey just could not throw him a competitive ball. 

This one is better. Granted, the depth of target isn’t significant, but ball placement was a major early issue against man coverage. Here, Bailey hits the outside shoulder where Jackson has a real chance to make a play on the ball, which he does. 

I really like this one as well.

State runs a HOSS concept, and Bailey’s eyes are good. He looks the safety toward the boundary and tries to get to Joly. Stanford is playing that same divorced coverage, which gets Joly in man coverage, but he gets capped and knocked off his route, which derails the play. Bailey gets a little jumpy in the pocket, but the freshman QB still does really well to climb and get his eyes back to the hitch, which is now going to work inside. He didn’t panic too much and kept his eyes up, something he was great at in this game. 

This play was also cool because it was a similar process as the play one above that he didn’t execute as well. This is the first time I’ve seen State run this pipe route concept. 

It’s a smash concept on both sides, and State wants Bailey to move the safety to the corner route opposite of the running back’s release, then sneak the running back up the now vacated seam. Bailey does this, but the back doesn’t separate on the route and the window isn’t really there. I think you’d like him to get to one of the hitches now instead of just taking off. He makes it work and gains a bunch of yards, so it’s fine on this play, but generally those routes are breaking in late to give him that option. He executed well in a similar situation one play above. Doeren always said that Bailey will make mistakes but he doesn’t often make the same one twice. This is an example of that. 

Here is another example of growth.

This is smash flood, which is a three-route concept with a hitch, a corner route, and a crossing route. State runs this a lot, and Bailey has read it poorly in the past. This time he nails it. Bailey reads the flat defender, who squats on the hitch. He moves to the corner route, and we can assume he didn't like this because the corner didn't gain enough depth. The hook defender (8) often works toward the boundary in a smash concept to squeeze the window to the corner route, which is why the crossing route can blow wide open coming through his original zone. That doesn't really happen here, but Bailey gets through the reads without delay and gets back to Joly who is open in the middle window. The timing and reads are good here.

As mentioned, the number one complaint with Bailey early on was a hesitancy that would allow windows to close and derail the timing of plays. This still exists, but every week there is less of it. 

This is a pure progression play from left to right. He comes off Joly quickly, which is good, and then gets to KC. He gets stuck on KC. It’s hard to see what the safety is doing since that’s off the screen, but he doesn’t progress to a wide open Noah Rogers. He should be doing that, or at least making some kind of decision. These types of plays often end in scrambles, so they don’t show up in the passing stats, and Bailey sometimes turns them into very successful scrambles. That’s fine when it happens but it’s no way to live. 

Overall, this was an excellent game for CJ Bailey. His timing was good. His ball placement was good. His eyes were mostly good. The pass protection was excellent, particularly Daylan Smothers, and State had zero drops. Combine this with the run game and it’s a total team effort. 

Nothing New from The Defense

As soon as I watched some of Stanford’s offensive tape, I knew the explosive runs were coming. There was just way too much misdirection, counter and gap scheme, and quarterback run concepts, you know, the exact kind of thing that State has been poor against. There’s no point of going too deep into this because it’s just who they are this year. That’s not going to change with three games left. State needs more of these types of offensive performances because it’s not shutting down the upcoming run games. 

It got to the point in the second half where Stanford ran QB counter on six of eight snaps. It literally just ran the same thing over and over again and waited for the incorrect fit to happen. The defensive line has come around more, and they were disruptive enough on some of these plays to mitigate the damage of some busts. Let’s be clear, though. State will get run on in the next three games. 

This is a bust, and I actually put this on Isaiah Shirley at left defensive end.

Shirley should be aligned between the tackle and the tight end here. He is, but right before the GIF starts, he bumps over to the more traditional 4i technique inside of the tackle. That's where you see him pre-snap, and this works against how State has defended counter when it's ran toward a tight end. Because of the shift, the tight end gets a free release and gets to Devon Betty, who cannot get around the block. The play hits right in the D gap where Betty should be.

The defensive line as a whole was actually pretty good. Davin Vann is obviously a beast who now leads the nation in forced fumbles. The whole unit created some havoc that saved the defense from some busts that definitely did happen. State's gap integrity issues remain, however.

It’s a Game of Execution

State’s offense executed at a high level on Saturday in every facet. Narratives around the offense this year have been negative and a little presumptuous, and I’ll be curious to see how this game gets discussed. There were tweaks and a few new concepts, but by and large, this offense was not different in any major way from a play calling perspective. It just executed everything better. The three longest plays of the game came on two zone runs and a slip screen. It ran HOSS and four verticals less than last week and was super balanced with 28 dropbacks and 33 runs. The biggest differences I noted were fewer vertical concepts and no designed quarterback runs, two things that were very prominent against Cal. The offense was balanced, less aggressive in its play calling than it was the last two weeks, and it was dominant. It’s all in the execution. Amazing what that execution and a few broken tackles can do, ain’t it? See also: Stanford is horrible. 

I don't make this point to defend Anae, whom I was critical of two weeks ago. I stand by those criticisms. This is a larger point that gets at the lack of execution in base concepts being one of the things, a large one, that stunted this offense. You didn't see this against Stanford. State ran its base concepts well and the skill position players made plays. Suddenly everything looked very different.

Final Thoughts

What an absolute banger. That was so fun. Hopefully, this is a launch pad for the run game. Every remaining opponent is better than Stanford and presents some issues for State. Duke has juice defensively. Georgia Tech will run gap scheme at you until your nose bleeds. UNC can run the ball and is coming on as a team just like NC State. The Pack is not scoring 59 on Duke, but every game left is winnable and losable. We'll see if the team can execute at this level the rest of the year and continue to make plays.

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