Midseason Report Card: They Are Who We Thought They Were

When I was eleven years old, I folded up my middle school report card and hid it in my backpack because I didn’t want my parents to know I got a C in art. Getting a C in art is kind of like losing to a coachless football team at home; it begs the question of how you manage to do that. Other than that though, I don’t think NC State needs to hide its report card for the first semester of this football season. This is not a bad football team, nor is it a great football team. It’s kind of exactly what we expected. 

The question coming into this season, at least for me, was "could NC State win an above-average number of close games?" The chance of it being a good enough team to play in a small number of those was not high. So far, it is 2-1 in one-possession games. It is also 3-2 in games that were one possession in the fourth quarter. The answer so far is no. Doeren’s thirteenth squad has shown some of the resiliency required, but it hasn’t made enough game-altering plays. The Pack has forced two turnovers all season, it’s lacking in negative play creation, and it hasn’t been able to wiggle around the sport’s natural variance as a result. “You win some, you lose some” definitely applies to this group.

State’s offense is what we thought it would be; inconsistent but explosive, particularly on the ground. The Pack has a high stuff rate and a low success rate when it runs the ball. It’s actually 83rd nationally in success rate, and Smothers himself sits under 40%. The team produces a lot of runs that go nowhere. It’s also in the 86th percentile for explosive runs, which is very good. This is the product of a line that predictably regressed from a very strong group a year ago, but was paired with one of the five best backs in America. Smothers is maybe the best improviser I’ve ever seen. If you give him just a glimpse of space, he’ll bust a forty yarder. If you give him no space, he may still just do it anyway. Almost 60% of Smothers yards have been over 15 yards down the field. He is one of the best football players in America.

State has had some well-blocked runs this year, and Smothers has made teams pay on those, but it’s also had issues with slants and aggressive “attack-react” defensive linemen. It’s not surprising that outside zone doesn’t look as good without Zeke Correll and Anthony Belton. Correll was pretty wildly underrated. It's not as if it's horrible, but that regression was just a reality that had to be dealt with.

Through the air, it’s also been a predictably up and down experience. The skill positions have been good, but quarterback play was always more of a question mark than the general narrative allowed it to be. Bailey still has a lot of growing to do. He was great against Virginia and machine-like against Wake, working through pure progression plays comfortably and on time, identifying pressures and throwing hot off them, and showing good ball placement down the field. It looked like he had turned a real corner. Unfortunately, the numbers from the Virginia Tech and Campbell games are telling lies.

Bailey was not particularly good in either of these games. The decisiveness from earlier in the season wasn’t there against the Hokies. You saw some beautiful anticipation throws in weeks two and three, but he was late to stuff, looked less comfortable having a presence in the pocket, and just wasn’t progressing as cleanly through concepts. Against Campbell, a high margin for error on most of his throws concealed what were some very iffy balls. I want to see a return to form from the first couple weeks. Every so often, Bailey puts just an absolutely wicked anticipation throw on tape. We want more of that quarterback and less of the one that is late to window throws because he stares at them too long. 

Wake Forest was pretty boring in its coverage matrix, while a team like Virginia Tech may have messed with his head more playing cover 3 and tampa 2 out of the same exact one-high shell. The quarterback is still developing a better awareness of post-snap safety movement, something that has given him trouble in his early career.

Defensively, the only real surprise comes from these bizarre run game numbers. State is 13th in the entire country (!!!) in defensive success rate against the run. That’s in the top 10% of the entire country. This does not matter, unfortunately, because they do not give out success rate titles. State is 90th in YPC. That’s kind of a mind-boggling distinction in stats that measure ostensibly similar information. State is good against the run on a down-to-down basis, but it misses enough tackles at the second level that it erases much of the value it creates from that by offering up 50-yard runs on a BOGO sale. If this was a good tackling team, it would be a borderline elite run defense. You do have to put the guy with the ball on the ground.

Brandon Cleveland’s name hasn’t been called as much, but he and Sabastian Harsh have both been pretty impactful as run defenders in the two-gap techniques that State has begun employing under Eliot. They’re both pretty good at it. State has had very few issues fitting the run. The structure of this new light box defense is working, but the execution is not. They just miss so many damn tackles. 

The pass defense has really been poor, and I’ve gone into more schematic detail about these issues. The safety play has been nothing short of terrible. An inability of the safeties to properly distribute routes in the State’s quarters structure has led to lots of explosives through the air. An easy adjustment is to switch to more post-closed structures, where you would primarily be a cover 3 and cover 1 team. Unfortunately, State has also struggled in man coverage.

When you play man, you will see motions into and out of stacks and bunches, and you will see mesh plays. These have broken State’s coverage rules a lot. It has struggled to navigate traffic and exchange responsibilities, and its attempts to communicate assignment changes off of motions have also led to breakdowns. Injuries have not helped here. Youth being forced onto the field undoubtedly contributes to mistakes in coverage. Senior portal acquisition JJ Johnson was supposed to ease those concerns, but he did not. 

On the report card, special teams gets a Q.

This all adds up to pretty much what we thought the team would be. In fact, my preseason picks for this season have yet to miss on a single game. Right now, it's a flawed but fun team subject to the variance of close football games that is not winning enough in the margins to win more than an average number of those games. When you live where this team is living, you win one week because Chandler Morris brainfarted, and you lose the next week because of a BS third-down heave that has like a 1% chance of being caught somehow getting caught.

The breaks will come and go. If this group wants to rally through the upcoming gauntlet of the schedule, it needs its quarterback to play closer to his ceiling more, it needs to create some actual game-changers on defense in the form of turnovers, and it obviously needs to not create extra possessions on special teams. If it also wants to tackle better, it has a chance to make some of these upcoming opponents quite one-dimensional. There are more winnable games on the remaining schedule than many might think. Notre Dame is probably not among them, but Pitt, Georgia Tech, FSU, and UNC are all their own degree of gettable. It's clear what State needs to do to make those possibilities reality.