.png)
It was certainly not the expectation prior to the season that we would be writing a CJ Bailey season evaluation with nearly ten games worth of snaps to pull from. That has been life at NC State, which has had exactly one season where a single quarterback started more than eight games since 2018. Bailey, a blue-chip true freshman from Florida who was supposed to redshirt this year, started exactly eight games for the Wolfpack, finishing the regular season with this stat line.
177/276 (64.1%)
2183 yards (7.9 YPA)
14 TDs
9 INTs
Bailey looked a lot like you'd expect a talented true freshman to look, with some high peaks and some low valleys. Trying to categorize his traits into positives and negatives is hard. There weren’t a lot of throughlines and dependable attributes with his play. Inconsistency was the name of the game, which is not a surprising development for a true freshman.
There are a lot of qualities that make up good quarterback play, but one and two without debate are decision making and accuracy. If you can't make good decisions and throw an accurate ball, you're cooked. We'll cover a lot of CJ Bailey in this article, but the bulk will be his ability to process from the pocket and make an accurate throw. As we go through the concepts, pay attention to the eyes of the quarterback and try and follow how he reads through the play. That's most of what we'll be talking about. First, a quick glossary.
Boundary side: The short side of the field
Field side: The wide side of the field
Post safety: Safety in the middle of the field
Pure progression: A passing play where the QB is taught the read the routes in a specific order
Seam route: Go route or inside fade originating from the seam
Dig route: An in-breaking route around 10-15 yards
Flat defender: Defensive player responsible for the shallow part of the field between the numbers and the sideline(ish)
Tampa 2: A version of cover 2 where a linebacker from the underneath zone sinks to a mid-depth zone to protect the area of the field between the safeties, a traditional vulnerability of cover 2
Special route: An over route from the #3 receiver in a 3x1 when running four verticals (see picture below)
Processing
One key area of development for Bailey is to make decisions on specific reads faster and cleaner. Not every passing play features an actual progression, but we’ll start with some pure progression plays for examples. In the earlier games, the young quarterback had a tendency to read pure progressions poorly, most of the time getting stuck on reads and disrupting the timing of the play. State did not run a tremendous amount of pure progression plays for Bailey. It leaned more of concepts like four verts, smash, and HOSS where the quarterback is reading a defender’s movement and throwing off of it. When it did run more progression-based stuff, it ran into this problem, but this is something that improved as the season went.
This is smash flood, a concept State ran a lot. Here is a schematic and how the quarterback is supposed to progress through the play.
Read flat defender
If he climbs to the hitch route, throw to the corner route
If he sinks to the corner route, throw the hitch
Backside crossing route
Check down.
This is a perfect example of Bailey sticking on a picture and not progressing through the play.
The flat defender sits hard on KC’s hitch route. This ball likely should go to Grimes, and if Bailey doesn’t like that, Joly is coming open on the crossing route as Wake’s hook defender is attaching to Concepcion. Bailey should see the flat defender and get his eyes to Grimes, and if the safety creates a bad picture, progress to Joly. He stares at KC and forces the ball into double coverage.
This is a pure progression play from the Stanford game.
The dig route from Noah Rogers (bottom of screen) is open here as the third progression. Bailey gets stuck on Concepcion and never progresses, ultimately leaving the throw on the field. This ball either needs to get thrown to KC or he needs to move on. He steps up in the pocket on a longer developing play but his eyes are still on KC.
This is from the Syracuse game and was one of the most egregious examples. This is the HOSS/Bow play that State used a lot, a play that it treated as a pure progression.
Seam route
Dig route
Stick route
Check down
With Syracuse in cover 3, Bailey should be throwing the seam route to Joly if the post safety fails to carry it. If he does carry it, and he should, it should create a window for the dig route. If an underneath defender falls to the dig route, it should create an easy window for the stick route.
The safety appears to have fallen asleep, as he doesn’t even move. The ball should go to Joly, and if it doesn’t, it should go to Rogers. These are wide open receivers and the ball goes nowhere. This shouldn’t be a scramble.
Here, Bailey makes a similar mistake in the same exact concept, this time with Duke in cover 1 man.
Bailey briefly glances at the seam, but comes off it too quick. He’s to the dig route fast, and then he’s running before the dig route even breaks. He’s able to run for the first down on third down, but this play had a lot more potential. Both Joly and Rogers won. Bailey could have hit Joly on the seam for a huge gain, and if the safety got a bead on it, he could hit the dig for another big gain. In this particular concept, he had a tendency to skip over the seam route altogether and then wouldn't let the dig route fly. Here, he’s running from a perfect pocket.
These kinds of plays get hidden a bit in the numbers when they don’t result in an incompletion or a sack. This should be a huge gain. A decent scramble is okay but it’s not the result these reps should produce based on how they develop.
Bailey’s tendency to look at good pictures and not release the ball was real. This was the second play from the UNC game.
It’s an ohio concept, which is a go route from the outside receiver and a quick out from the insider receiver, with UNC showing soft man coverage on Joly. Bailey pumps on the out breaker but doesn’t throw the ball. This should be an easy first down. Bailey sees it, sticks on it and doesn’t make a decision, and then a scramble drill has to commence.
This is the biggest thing for Bailey as we head into the offseason. He needs to trust his pictures more, make faster decisions, and ultimately leave fewer throws on the field. What we wanted to see from a true freshman quarterback this year was consistent growth. Expectations were not high and should not have been. From his first start through the Stanford game, I thought he consistently improved in this respect. He struggled through the final three, but still put up some examples of higher level quarterback play. All things considered, this flaw is number one for me.
What was cool, though, was seeing Bailey execute the same concepts better later in the season. This is smash flood, the concept referenced a few sections above, read well and explained in detail via our Trinity Road Tape series.
It’s the same exact look as the Wake game with this concept matching up against cover 3. Bailey reads through this cleanly and gets back to the crossing route for a first down. Seeing a quarterback mess up a specific concept against a specific coverage, then seeing him execute the same concept well later on against a very similar coverage is always fun. It’s obvious growth.
Here’s another. This is HOSS/Bow, also discussed above. It’s cover 3, and Bailey should read the seam first and make sure the safety carries it, then work down to the dig, and finally to the stick route.
This is good. He picks up the seam and doesn't jump off it too fast. The post safety works that way and opens a window in the middle of the field. Bailey then reads over and hits the window. The ball is a little late and high, but he reads the concept well and gets the ball in there. I think you saw Bailey develop more comfort in progression-based passing concepts later in the season.
Reading safeties
We talked a little about Bailey reading defender movement with the smash flood play and some of the hi-lo stuff the Pack did. Without question, State’s favorite passing concept in 2024 was four verticals. Four verticals is very adaptable to any coverage and is fundamentally a horizontal stretch of the safeties, but can also be effective against man coverage by creating one-on-ones on the outside and letting the quarterback pick his matchup. State relied a lot on four verticals as well as its cousins, 989 and HOSS, to build the bulk of its heavily-vertical passing attack.
All of these concepts ask the quarterback to interact heavily with the safeties. Bailey was up and down here. These concepts are where most of his best throws came from, but they’re also where some of his missed opportunities came from.
This is a HOSS concept versus Duke. Fundamentally, the play seeks to attack the seams and horizontally stretch a middle safety with mirrored seam routes. On the outside, the QB has hitches that can be treated like free access alerts, meaning you claim an easy completion if you get soft alignment before the snap. Bailey should start this play on the boundary hitch. He’s got a two-high structure, which can eliminate the seams, and soft coverage from the corners.
He starts on the boundary side because it’s a shorter throw, and he tries to claim the free yards. Duke tried to fool him by rolling the safety down to the hook zone and blitzing the linebacker. The safety coming down spoils the free throw. Bailey, to his credit, does not force the ball. This should clue the quarterback in that there aren’t two safeties high. He could hit the tight window to KC here, although it's a tough throw. He could get backside if he reads the safety roll and looks to the opposite seam. It’s a touchdown if he gets that far. Bailey didn’t seem to pick up the roll into cover 3 from two high, and State leaves yards on the field as a result. He didn't like the boundary side picture and immediately checked it down.
This one was early in the year against Louisiana Tech, when Bailey tried to go back shoulder to Anderson.
The back-shoulder ball was not really in his repertoire, and we’ll talk more about the downfield accuracy in a minute, but this was a nice pass. It’s four verticals against cover 1, so Bailey is usually just picking his matchup and trying to throw a competitive ball. The problem is that he stares it down, and the safety in the middle of the field is able to get to the ball.
The processing errors feel like the most addressable part of this evaluation. That's a comfort level and speed of game output, and Bailey did show growth here during the season. He threw to largely wide open pictures against Louisiana Tech and then State played through mostly lower difficulty concepts against Clemson. When it ratcheted up a bit against NIU and Wake Forest, you started to see him struggle. From that point, he started showing flashes of cleaner processing, even as his overall performances were up and down. There was growth in the Syracuse game, Cal and Stanford were both strong performances, and then he backslid a bit over the final three, but still showed flashes of higher level execution in more quarterback dependent concepts. We're going to look at the positive examples now.
This was one of my favorite throws of the season. The Duke game was a treasure trove of interesting film because it was nothing but disguised coverages and blitzes all game. They got him several times, but he did well with this one.
Duke shows a two-high structure and ends up playing Tampa 2, but it inverts the boundary safety and corner. The inside receiver to the boundary is uncovered before the snap, and State has an ohio concept on that side. Bailey likes this picture because it figures to be wide open. When Duke rolls the safety down into the hook area and drops the blitzer to the flat, it removes this option. The quarterback works backside to the over route from Justin Joly. The boundary safety is wide after being influenced by the go route at the bottom of the screen, and Bailey throws a banger, cramming the ball into the window between the safety and hole defender.
This may have been a pure progression play, I'm not totally sure, but I like Bailey coming off that out route in a timely manner and getting to the back side. Duke tried to fool him with the safeties and a disguised blitz, and he picked it up and worked through the play.
This one against Cal was well-processed as well. Sometimes Bailey would look uncomfortable against disguised coverages. He didn't always pick up new pictures well post-snap, which I assume is why Georgia Tech showed so much 0 blitz and cover 1 pressure and played different stuff from there. He did well in the Duke clip above and I think this one was my favorite.
Cal is showing cover 2 man, which is a coverage that's pretty effective against four verticals. Every route has a man matchup and the safeties can help on either vertical on their respective sides. State running four verts out of a 3x1 changes the picture for the Bears. The single-side vertical should occupy the boundary safety and the two field-side verticals should occupy the field safety. KC is matched up on a linebacker and should not have any safety help on the play running the special route, as he'll be underneath. Bailey gets this and is going to start on the special route from KC, but Cal plays stump, which is a check specifically for a 3x1 that's designed to prevent this negative matchup. The field safety will now play man on KC if his route is vertical, and the linebacker will zone to the hole. Bailey is on KC at the snap, but picks this check up and immediately works back to Joly who is now matched up on a nickel with no safety help.
I've watched this play a lot and wondered if this was something they saw a lot of in the film room, and if Bailey knew this check was in play when the safety communicated with the linebacker before the snap. Either way, this is the kind of play you want to see. This is detailing the ceiling in my opinion. I like that he came off of a bad picture quickly and knew where to go.
I liked this one from Syracuse as well. This is not a hard throw, but it's well read.
State runs smash fade into the boundary and a drive concept over the middle, giving the quarterback a man and zone answer. Bailey reads the fade first, makes a quick and correct decision to get off of it, and reads back to the drive. The Orange's post safety is in lala land again, and this time, Bailey hits the bust for a touchdown.
This is another strong one against Syracuse. It's tough to tell for certain, but it looks like the Orange drop into Tampa 2 here. State is again in four verts, its favorite play. This is fantastic from Bailey, one of his best plays of the year and probably his second best actual throw.
Part of the beauty of four verts comes in the route adjustments. When you run this from a 3x1 against a split-field coverage, your number three is on the special route and your number two will convert this to a bender to attack the middle of the field. It ends up looking like this.
These routes that follow each other over the middle of the field are pretty textbook Tampa 2 beaters, as the first one creates the hole in the middle by occupying the hole defender. This is how State attacks here. Bailey reads the boundary safety first and confirms the coverage. Syracuse's boundary corner is giving depth, so something like a cover 3 cloud could be in play. After that, he's straight to Joly on the seam bender, and the anticipation on this throw is elite. Look where Joly is when Bailey's hands break.
Bailey is a fascinating evaluation to me because of stuff like this. This is a great play from top to bottom. The pre-snap ID, the processing post-snap, the anticipation, and the accuracy are all there. It's a complete play. Robert Anae suddenly became Tim Beck this year with his commitment to calling this play, something State did not run a ton of last year. Bailey was up and down in it, but the ups were high. This one was good also.
This is what I meant early in the article about a lack of a throughline. There weren't a lot of traits, good or bad, that were consistent for the young quarterback. He had some plays that you wanted to print out and kiss, and then he did some really strange and poor stuff. If his follow-up campaign can feature more consistent processing closer to the ceiling he demonstrated in 2024, he should be a strong college quarterback as a sophomore. There isn't a lot that was just totally absent from his game. Consistency is the step you want him to take.
Accuracy
Much like all of the post-snap processing film we just watched, Bailey's accuracy in 2024 left something to be desired, but followed a generally positive trendline over the course of the year.
Some of Bailey's best routes were the deep comebacks and sideline out-breakers. He had good timing and accuracy on these types of throws. When he could drive the ball at a mostly-still target, he was pretty solid. He also threw the over route and it cousins pretty well, which we looked at above. When those routes would throttle down in the zone, he hit them at a decent enough clip. Often, they would be a bit high but having Justin Joly makes people forget that.
Bailey struggled with glances, shallow digs, and crossers against man coverage. He also did not throw a very competitive deep ball for most of the season, although that was something that definitely improved. He didn't have a great back-shoulder ball as a freshman and had a definite tendency to leave one-on-one balls inside, which is a big no-no.
Early on in the season when State was still trying to keep things simple for Bailey, it tried to manufacture opportunities for explosives with these formation-into-boundary go routes. It got some pass interference calls from them, but a total of zero completions. These concepts demonstrated the room for growth on the deep ball really well.
Here State tries to go FIB and throw the fade, and the ball doesn't land in play.
State eventually abandoned this stuff because Bailey was having trouble throwing a competitive ball on these routes.
This is the same idea. It's an FIB alignment to try and isolate Rogers, and the ball is left way inside.
Bailey is never going to hit all of these. He is not a cyborg. But a more competitive ball that gives Rogers a chance to make a play on it probably results in a handful of extra explosives over the course of the season.
Here is one more where an explosive was left on the field for accuracy reasons. This came from a shock concept, something State did not run frequently. With a cover 1 picture, Bailey should take this fade, and he does, but he just overthrows the ball.
Getting more elevation on his downfield throws is a big step for him. This might be a product of the arm angle. I don't know, I'm not a throwing mechanics guy, but more elevation gives receivers a better chance to run under the ball. Earlier in the season, his accuracy on anything that wasn't a laser was a clear area demanding improvement.
Bailey's a bit of enigma, as we've emphasized so far. Deep ball accuracy was definitely not a strength, but even so, he threw a few dimes. This one below wasn't perfect but it was really good.
This is HOSS against cover 1. The safety is aligned way right relative to the formation, so Bailey can easily take the fade from KC, which is a good idea most of the time. His win rate in man coverage was ridiculous, and he wins here. This is a really good ball that's elevated well. Perfection isn't realistic all the time. This is plenty good enough. He started to go from bad to inconsistent when it came to downfield accuracy as the season progressed. What's funny is his incremental growth giving you some optimism, and then he just makes this throw in the below clip, which is one of the best throws an NC State quarterback has made under Dave Doeren, period, no qualifiers.
Again, CJ Bailey is demonstrating a high ceiling here. I do wonder if he stared it down a bit, but the accuracy is as close to perfect as you can get and the elevation on the ball to drop it in front of the corner is elite. There was no inkling that this throw was in his toolbox before he caught this snap. Can he play more consistently at this level in 2025?
Throwing a really good deep ball consistently is hard. The bigger issue for me was the inaccuracies on underneath routes. These were all over the place. Bailey would often leave the ball behind receivers on glance routes and hard-breaking digs against man coverage. Sometimes he would throw a hospital ball out in front. These are easier throws, and this should be cleaned up.
In a few examples, these looked like read issues where he was expecting the receiver to throttle down in the zone and they didn't, but most are just misses. Duke played a lot of man coverage in the second half and State performed a crushing duet of dropped passes and bad balls to waste a high win rate on routes. He needs to hit these routes at a higher rate. You shouldn't miss at a depth of five yards very often at all.
Other stuff
Pocket Presence
Poor presence is generally a hallmark of freshman quarterback play, and it was here. This isn't a red flag to me that really needs too much discussion. It's something that figures to come with time. He had a tendency to bail on good pockets, and when he tried not to, he didn't move within the pocket well.
I don't know where Bailey thought he was going here. Hopefully, he can laugh about this one as it came in a win and he was good in the game.
Arm strength
There are no concerns about arm strength. He's got it.
Play making
This isn't a huge thing for a quarterback, but it's worth noting that Bailey made some plays in some scramble drills and general discombobulation this year, and that's cool. Sometimes, this was of his own doing, sometimes it wasn't, but stuff like this shows inklings an ability to operate a scramble drill and not panic when things go sideways.
This was a product of the quarterback not throwing the ball when he should, which goes back to the beginning of the article, but he bails himself out with some craziness. He can be chaotic at times, but he does not lack entertainment value.
Running
Bailey is a terrible runner. I'm sorry, he is. He can be a useful scrambler, but in designed concepts, it was bad. This was one of the few places that did not have really any positive trend to it. He doesn't read blocking leverage well, and that's like half of running the ball.
I don't really put this on Bailey so much as I do the play calling. The quarterback himself said he wasn't a runner in high school and has had to develop that trait, a questionable ask from the coaching staff that backfired on basically any play that did not have elite blocking.
Leadership
Bailey is a locker room guy. This stuff does matter, even as it's basically impossible to evaluate from the outside. I've loved the personality he's approached the game with, and he really does seem to have a natural-born leadership voice. This play from the UNC game stood out to me. This an Ohio concept with Joly running the quick out. The picture is good and Bailey wants to go to it.
Joly for some reason starts run blocking. This isn't an RPO so I'm not really sure what was going on here. Bailey is pissed, though. That's a freshman quarterback taking a leadership role and getting on his upperclassmen tight end for screwing up. This also stood out to me after Lex Thomas threw a touchdown down 31 points at Clemson.
I'm reaching here, as is always the case when you try and evaluate mindset, but I liked these plays.
Final Thoughts
CJ Bailey was a heavily flawed quarterback in the regular season of 2024. He needs to improve his post-snap processing and his accuracy first and foremost, but he demonstrated growth in both areas and a very enticing ceiling. State had to spend money on a quarterback this offseason, and it needed to choose whether it wanted to chase experience in the portal or bet on Bailey's development. In my opinion, it made the right decision. Continuity matters, all indications are that he's a positive locker room presence, and you have a chance to play the development game with a player that has shown you a high ceiling. I think it's important that Bailey has demonstrated higher level execution, even if it's been in spurts. It builds confidence in the attainability of a finished product, and this quarterback as a finished product could be a really good player.
Want more from Trinity Road Times? Find us in these places.
Red Tier (Premium chat for more scheme breakdowns and discussion)
Comentarios