Don’t be fooled into believing that NC State will wolf down a cupcake against a poor team on Saturday in Winston-Salem. Tom O’Brien certainly isn’t, and Pack fans would be wise to believe their coach: State’s upcoming road and conference opener will be anything but an easy win for the favored Red and White.
Despite State’s gaudy defensive ranking of #1 nationally in Total Defense, O’Brien puts little faith in the numbers at this point. “It doesn’t really say anything,” he said in yesterday’s weekly presser. “If we’re there after 12 games, I think it will say a lot about our defense.” But not until, obviously.
O’Brien has legitimate reason for concern. Before making an in-game adjustment, State’s defense was being run over by freshman Dion Lewis, who was able to escape weak tackles and players out of position in order to gain nearly eighty yards before the half. Lewis may have had even more yards, but poor special teams play on the part of the Wolfpack was leaving Pittsburgh with a short field most of the first two quarters. Quarterback Bill Stoll was also effective passing the ball against the NC State secondary, and ended the game with a little more than 200 yards passing with two touchdowns against no interceptions. More telling, in the Pitt game, the Wolfpack defense missed at least twenty tackles, continuing a disturbing trend that is unfortunately developing into an identity: this edition of the NC State stopping unit is simply comprised of poor take-down artists.
Yet somehow the Wolfpack was able to win the game, mostly because of an outstanding offensive effort that saw NC State move the ball nearly at will, and also because the defense was able to stop the Panthers from scoring a tying touchdown after they were handed the ball on the State 8 yard line as the clock melted down. In that stand, State rose to the occasion, and prevented the game from being tied and possibly into an overtime stanza where anything could happen. A sure TD pass was knocked away from Pitt receiver Dorin Dickerson’s hands by safety Brandon Bishop one play before a pressured and hurried Stull’s fourth-down pass sailed out of the end zone with 1:15 left, handing the football back to NC State and with it a hard-earned victory.
Against Wake Forest and their mildly hostile crowd (expect a great deal of red-clad fans in Winston on Saturday) State will again face a wily and competent quarterback in Riley Skinner, and this time, the game will be on the opposition’s turf. Wake Forest leads the ACC in total offense with 412.2 yards per game, where Skinner has a misdirection-oriented multiple-option ground attack at his disposal, one designed specifically to take advantage of teams the stray from a disciplined hard-nosed and hard tackling style. In short, Wake Forest, despite their 0-1 ACC and 2-2 overall record will present another major challenge for a defensive unit that really isn’t as good as their stats might indicate.
On offense, State will have a major advantage in that their unit is firing on all cylinders and the Wake Forest defense is allowing more than 350 yards per game. Sophomore QB Russell Wilson will undoubtedly again prove to be elusive in the passing pocket, where he can extend plays giving receivers time to escape their defensive shadows or to simply take off on his own, usually for big gains. While he was bottled up against the South Carolina Gamecocks, Wilson has lit it up since then, increasing his personal total offense stats to 271 yards per game. Granted, two of those games were against far inferior opponents Gardner-Webb and Murray State, but his last game against the quality defense of Pittsburgh proved that Wilson has lost little if any of his 2008 mojo.
State’s offense also features the running tandem of Toney Baker and Jamelle Eugene, who collectively are quite a load for any defense to handle for four quarters. Baker has returned to the field after two years of medical redshirts due to knee injuries, and it looks like he has lost very little of his nationally-touted pre-injury skills. A threat as both a receiver and a pounding north-south runner, Baker will be playing in a homecoming game of sorts as BB&T Field in Winston-Salem is the closest ACC stadium to his hometown of Jamestown, NC, which is between Greensboro and High Point. Jamelle Eugene, who has had some in-season injuries, has yet to recapture his game-breaking 2008 abilities, but as each week without him on the NC State Injury Report goes without mention of him, it is reasonable to believe that Eugene will round into form and once again be the formidable weapon that he was last season.
Two final intangibles simply cannot be overlooked for this game: penalties and the invisible yardage of the kicking game. Despite winning against Pittsburgh last week, NC State can ill-afford another week where it garners 12 penalties and gives away 81 yards in the process. At home, there were numerous procedure fractions against the Wolfpack offensive line, including four false starts. Even though BB&T Field is hardly a deafening venue, the offensive line will need to be sharper before the snap and not get a set of downs “off schedule” by twitching or leaving early and setting the team back five unnecessary yards. The same is true for correctly lining up at the line of scrimmage, and thus avoiding boneheaded “five men in the backfield” procedure calls. In the kicking game, not only do punts and kickoffs need to be sharper, so does the downfield coverage that minimizes returns. It is of paramount importance to the Wolfpack’s chances that they force Wake Forest into long-field situations instead of leaving the Deacons near or beyond midfield when Skinner and his offensive unit trot out to begin a possession. These two things are critical keys to this game, and given the year-to-year excellence that are Wake’s special teams, could indeed turn into the deciding factor between loss and victory.
On paper, this game has every look of a potential shootout, one that may well be decided by who has the ball last. Then again, games are not played on paper, and footballs take extremely funny bounces — especially in an ACC that is not filled with powerhouses, but instead a collection of good-but-not-great teams. In other words, anything could happen in Winston-Salem, and despite being favored heading into this contest, all indications are that NC State will need to be firing on all cylinders if it plans to come away with a win in a stadium that quite honestly has been a house of horrors for them for the past decade. Wake Forest has won three of the last four contests, including the past three games in Winston-Salem, where the Pack has not won since 2001.
Perhaps Tom O’Brien put is best yesterday. “This is conference play,” he said. Then, in a statement that needs to be perfectly clear to State players, he added that “this is the big time. This is where you earn championships, right here. You’ve got to man-up now.”
Last Ten Games Against Wake Forest
| Year | W/L | Site | Score |
| 2008 | Won | Home | 21-17 |
| 2007 | Lost | Away | 38-18 |
| 2006 | Lost | Home | 25-23 |
| 2005 | Lost | Away | 27-19 |
| 2004 | Won | Home | 27-21 (OT) |
| 2003 | Lost | Away | 38-24 |
| 2002 | Won | Home | 32-13 |
| 2001 | Won | Away | 17-14 |
| 2000 | Won | Home | 32-14 |
| 1999 | Lost | Away | 31-7 |
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