South Alabama vs NC State Preview: Take Two

'11 Football General46

Sometimes, you just need a “Take Two” moment. You realize the first “take” maybe wasn’t what you wanted it to be and just need to go back to the beginning. Maybe the lighting wasn’t right… maybe the dialog wasn’t executed the best… or maybe your secondary just sucked to high Hell and needs a second chance to redeem themselves.

NC STATE’S 2011 TAKE TWO

Now that we have that out of our system, NC State can look forward to South Alabama where it will have a “Take Two” moment to reset, evaluate problems from the first two games, reinforce strengths that we’ve seen thus far, and work on the overall execution of BOTH offensive and defensive schema. Tom O’Brien understands that this is the team’s “Take Two” game…

We have to come out with a whole different mindset and effort than we’ve been getting out of this football team. I have to get it out of them and I’m going to get it out of them. (WF-NCSU Locker Room Interview)

Take Two: On to South Alabama.

WHAT THE HELL IS A “SOUTH ALABAMA”

 South Alabama is in the DIAA ‘Independent Conference’ (same conference as Georgia State for those familiar).  As it is with many smaller conference schools, you’re on top of the world one week and in the gutter the next, so it’s difficult to tell what to expect.  So far, the South Alabama Jaguars (dressed in solid red… what is it with scheduling other “red” D1AA schools?) have defeated both of their opening opponents (West Alabama 20-12 and Lamar 30-8).  Even though the Jags managed to defeat West Alabama, they struggled, throwing 3 picks and allowing almost 270 yards against a team that isn’t even D1.  They were able to put it together and absolutely crush Lamar, running up the score early in the first half and not allowing Lamar to score until the second half.  What the Jaguars haven’t had to do thus far is go on the road and/or play a D1A opponent.

Jags Have Something To Prove.
Oh, when I said they hadn’t played a D1A opponent, I didn’t mean this season, I meant EVER.  That’s right, South Alabama’s FCS football program has only played 19 games in their program’s history and won every single one of them and never once met a D1A opponent.  Regardless, this is the kind of team that can embarrass a “bigger program”.  This is a team coming off a 19 game winning streak against their peers, but still not gaining any attention on any sort of a national stage due to their schedule and lack of a complete season.  Last season, the Jags only played 7 games.  Unlike other FCS opponents who come into Carter-Finley feeling cocky at their own FCS success, expect the Jags to come to Raleigh having something to prove to their peer FCS programs and willing to fight hard for a victory.

Talent
They are going to be fielding a wide receiver who was the first senior in their program’s history to make the Senior Bowl and to be signed into the NFL by the NY Jets (he did not get drafted).  Signed by the NY Jets?  Then what is he doing back on the team?!  Long story-short, he was cut.  Still, last season he earned 59 catches for 1282 yards at South Alabama.

Their quarterback is quickly improving on his early performance.  Opening week, he allowed 3 interceptions and only totaled 151 yards.  Last week he totaled worse with 144 yards.  However, when he does pass, he is reasonably accurate, completing 9 for 14 last week and 12 for 21 the week before.  The Jaguars don’t pass a lot, but that’s because they are so capable on the ground.

Last week, the Jaguars totaled 356 yards, 205 of that was on the ground.  That total is broken into 36 attempts for 5.7 yards each.  If the running game is their source of success, this may be a good opportunity to work on fundamentals and coverage for the NC State secondary.

South Alabama’s defense is suspect, even in their own division.  Against the admittedly poor performance against West Alabama, they spent most of the game down at their own endzone.  The improvements in week 2 were seen mostly in rushing defense where they were able to improve from allowing a DII team to post 170 yards rushing to holding a comparable D1AA school to 115 yards rushing.

Still Not A Huge Threat
After how furious O’Brien was in the “wake” of our last loss (my word-play is second to none…), and after the less-than-impressive victory over Liberty, I don’t see any way this game is close.  If it is, expect for O’Brien to be charged with crimes against humanity for the punishment he is likely to put his players through.  All emotion aside, NC State’s team did play better in week 2 on the road than they did week one against a D1AA opponent at home (318yds offense became 424yds offense in week 2 against a better team).  The only threat that South Alabama may pose is if their quarterback, CJ Bennet, is given a few more opportunities to go into the air.  He has managed to do “decent” in their past several games and with a fairly talented WR on the field; we can’t put it pass the secondary to wiff on some big plays.

All-in-all, this should be a fairly soft opponent that offers temporal challenges throughout the game, allowing for our players to gain more experience.

REASONS TO WATCH

1) Glennon keeps getting hotter and hotter.  His performance last night was less than stellar before the second half, but at the end of the night, he matched his 58% completion rate from his first game and had made 10 more passing attempts than the week prior.  Watch for how long it takes Glennon to warm up.  In both games, his first halves are averaging out to a 54% completion rate while his second halves are at 61%.  Can Glennon come out of the gate hot (or at the very least, start getting hot before the half)?

2) Attention Offensive Line… if you can’t beat the easy ones, you can’t beat the hard ones.  During the Liberty game, Glennon was in serious trouble.  It’s fair to say that they did much better against Wake, but still didn’t perform well (Glennon was sacked 4 times against Liberty vs 0 times against Wake).  They need to maintain the protection over the pocket and help to open up the run.  Against Wake, NC State was unable to improve on it’s 111 yards rushing and ended up with 109 yards.  Watch to see how the offensive line stiffens against the blitz and opens up the run.  That could be said of any football team, but against a soft opponent, these maneuvers should be flawless (if executed correctly).

3) Secondary needs to work on basics. There are different coaching mentalities with defensive backs and I’m not sure which one our staff is teaching.  They need to continue to play the ball, not the receiver. (NOTE: One of our staple members/writers and former Wolfpacker, “theCOWDOG”, has brought up that this may semantically be incorrect.  I am attempting to point out that the secondary has been playing with a very “soft” defense where they allow the receivers to make-or-break their own catches, and simply prevent “the big play”.  This seems to make it easy for talented QBs to go downfield and rely on the skill of their receivers.  What NC State needs to begin to do is poise themselves better to interrupt the pass before it gets to the receiver’s hands.)  Against Liberty, the defense was able to pull down 4 interceptions because on those plays they were trying to play the ball rather than the receiver.  There were moments against Wake where you could see that happening, but there was a lot of aimless chasing around of the receivers.  I think we’d all like to see better fluidity between safeties and see more aggressive plays for the ball.  Watch to see how these safeties are worked on throughout the week to see if their fundamentals are being reinforced and they are executing efficiently.

4) If nothing else, Wil Baumann and Niklas Sade will have an outstanding game and will no doubt become the guys we rely on to clean-up whatever mess the offense may lay on the field.  Sade, despite missing 2 extra points, is totaling 16 points on the year including 3/3 field goals, one from 45 yards out.  Baumann is averaging almost 40 yards per punt with long-kicks both against Liberty and Wake Forest that are close to 50 yards.

About NCStatePride

***ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NCStatePride has been writing for StateFansNation.com since 2010 and is a 2009 graduate of the College of Engineering.

'11 Football General

46 Responses to South Alabama vs NC State Preview: Take Two

  1. NCStatePride 09/14/2011 at 11:13 AM #

    theCOWDOG, I think it is semantics after you explain it like that. What you call “playing off the receiver and then reacting” I call “reading the pass, then playing off the ball”. I understand what you’re saying and know you obviously have a ton of experience with this so I’m not arguing with that. What we saw against Wake, at against Liberty to a lesser extent, was having players in the backfield to a very good job of covering their zone and passing off coverage from the midfield to the backfield, but once the ball was in the air, they just kind of watched the received make the catch instead of “ball hawking” it.

    UPDATE: I did add a little blip in there after this discussion. I don’t want to be sending the wrong message or speaking inaccurately, especially in a blog article. Thanks for the correction/update, theCOWDOG.

  2. VaWolf82 09/14/2011 at 11:14 AM #

    This warning was obviously ignored by those that were predicting an easy win against WF.

    I’m not sure why you come after me at every turn.

    This is the first post I’ve made about the delusional predictions some were making before the WF game. Now something like this would be coming after you:

    I stand by what I wrote.

    Good to know:

    With Price, we win by 10-14 (maybe more).

    Just for those keeping score at home.

  3. Packfan28 09/14/2011 at 11:38 AM #

    I wish we were playing a better opponent to get a more accurate gauge of whether improvements were made this week in practice. The only things we will see Saturday are MG playing pitch and catch with Graham and Palmer, Underwood (and even) Washington running wild, and our defense will suddenly look like the Steel Curtain. All of which means we can beat the hell out of South Alabama.

  4. TruthBKnown Returns 09/14/2011 at 11:58 AM #

    I believe I already said I expected Price to be gimpy if he played at all. I was only wrong about the health of Price’s knee. Period.

    You know, just for those keeping score at home.

    But I did also expect a little more from our defense. I don’t think many of us saw the defense being this much of a train wreck, even after Liberty.

  5. packplantpath 09/14/2011 at 12:17 PM #

    TBK, after your defense of Lowe for so long (I think you did eventually come around), I think most of us simply assume you have the “homer” predictions now. Nothing wrong with being overly optimistic, but the more realistic among us automatically assign your prediction a few discount points.

    “But I did also expect a little more from our defense. I don’t think many of us saw the defense being this much of a train wreck, even after Liberty.”

    Another example. After liberty, predicting the defense was a train wreck is like predicting water is wet. You didn’t see it because you chose not to see it. It doesn’t take a great QB to burn this secondary. I don’t doubt much that wake’s backup guy would have burned us too.

  6. NCStatePride 09/14/2011 at 12:22 PM #

    But I did also expect a little more from our defense. I don’t think many of us saw the defense being this much of a train wreck, even after Liberty.

    I don’t think many of us made predictions based on the pure assumption that the defense would be better, either. When we did a live blog here on SFN on game day, I had a brief poll up asking people’s predictions. Out of the 50-some votes it received, one person voted for a strong victory. Maybe that was you, I don’t know, but I think most of the readers on here did a decent job tempering their predictions.

    Did any of us predict “how bad” the defense was going to be? Not many of us. Then again, we did attempted to predict that the best-case-scenario would exist where the defense was stiff, the offensive line was solid, and Price’s “sprained ankle” would damn his performance. I think that is why people get a little annoyed at the overly optimistic expectation whether we go into Wake or Cincy… they assume EVERYTHING will go right which just isn’t realistic, even for a good NC State team.

  7. TruthBKnown Returns 09/14/2011 at 2:46 PM #

    Pride, it wasn’t a sprained ankle. It was a sprained knee.

    And I didn’t think the Liberty results were due to a horrible State defense. It was a first game, and they have a pretty great QB and a 6’5″ receiver, and several transfers from D-1A programs. I still gave our defense the benefit of the doubt because I credited the Liberty offense rather than blaming our defense. Plus, our defense did much better in the second half of the Liberty game. I thought (hoped) that we had gotten our act together. Sometimes teams come out flat against “lesser” opponents and have to wake up. I thought that was the case with our defense.

    Now with two poor defensive showings, I am no longer optimistic about our defense. They have something to prove again, and I don’t think they will. Until our injured guys return to the line up, if then.

  8. NCStatePride 09/14/2011 at 3:02 PM #

    Pride, it wasn’t a sprained ankle. It was a sprained knee.

    …a sprain. It wasn’t a break, it wasn’t a torn ligament, it was a sprained something. A sprained something that halfway through the week (actually, as of when I wrote the preview) we knew he had recovered from. It was foolish to make the assumption that the opponent would play anything other than his record suggested, but that was your choice. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be any “magical player” on S. Alabama’s team that can similarly be underestimated.

    It was a first game, and they have a pretty great QB and a 6’5″ receiver, and several transfers from D-1A programs

    So what you’re telling me is that it should have been acceptable to have 400 yards run up on us because they have a good D1AA QB and a bunch of people who left (i.e., didn’t flourish) at other D1A programs?

    If you are going to follow that logic, as I noted in the article, we should be accepting if S. Alabama absolutely destroys our secondary because, after all, they do have a former NFL player on their team.

  9. packhammer 09/14/2011 at 3:36 PM #

    Nothing like a poor showing and a loss to a division rival early in the season to bring out the best in Wolfpack Nation! We can even argue about who made the worst prediction last week and why they didn’t predict what they predicted because the prediction was contingent on an ankle injury which was really his knee. This is great stuff!

  10. wolfbuff 09/14/2011 at 4:07 PM #

    I wonder if they know Slim (kudos to whoever catches the reference).

  11. packplantpath 09/14/2011 at 8:23 PM #

    I’ll tell you guys what. I’m going to make my next game prediction in the following form:

    Pr(A|B)=(Pr(B|A)Pr(A))/Pr(B) Where A = “OUR D IS GOOD!!!” and B = “the opponents QB is injured”.

  12. NCStatePride 09/14/2011 at 9:11 PM #

    ^Best… game… prediction… ever…

  13. sundropdrinker13 09/14/2011 at 10:03 PM #

    On PackInsider, I made comments about how bad our defense was during the Liberty game. Yes we got turnovers, but we gave up WAY too many yards BEFORE we got the turnovers. We were lucky that they didn’t score more points than they did. Their QB stared down the receivers, and our DBs jumped the routes. I knew during the Liberty game that our defense was in trouble. Even in that game we played too soft on the coverage too often. Watching that game got me worried for the season, and listening to then watching the game against Wake reinforced my worries, as NOTHING was fixed from the Liberty game. And no TBK, our defense didn’t play better in the 2nd half against Liberty. They allowed Liberty to score 14 of their 21 points in the 2nd half. That’s 2/3 of their points in the half that you said that they played better in. I don’t know how to find out yards per quarter and such, but Liberty’s last 3 possessions resulted in turnovers, a fumble and 2 interceptions. We got lucky there, as they were down and HAD to throw, so some throws were forced, as is often the case in that situation. The fumble and 1st INT led to 14 points for us, so Liberty had still been in it down 29-21 with just under 9 minutes to go. So we got lucky with the forced/bad throws there at the end. Our defense was still horrible in the 2nd half.

  14. 3boys 09/14/2011 at 10:29 PM #

    Heard tonight game was official sell-out. As my Mama says – “Honey, it will be allll right . . .everything will work out.” As a life long Wolfpacker – hope springs eternal and there is always our next game . .

  15. bTHEredterror 09/14/2011 at 10:34 PM #

    I agree, the next test is Cincy, there is nothing to be gained from this game….literally. No matter if we win by 1 or 100 it won’t count come bowl time.

    This is a pray no one gets hurt, play fundamental football, get game experience for subs game. I want to see the RBs run with venom, Glennon complete 80% of his passes and the defense give up less than 2 scores. Just improve execution and get a rhythm going with the starters, and then cheer on the stringers and look for future playmakers.

  16. bamawolfpacker 09/14/2011 at 11:03 PM #

    Let me just say, as a 1988 NCSU grad living in Mobile, AL, we had better not take these guys too lightly. I can say that they are VERY, VERY pumped up for this game, and would just love to get some of the publicity that Alabama and Auburn get down here by beating their first FBS opponent.

    Also, whats up with Mark Gottfried jumping out of a plane? I am suddenly having flashbacks to Monte Kiffin and his lone ranger outfit. Hope the results are better this time.

  17. 61Packer 09/15/2011 at 12:02 AM #

    No one has mentioned that we not only play South Alabama this Saturday, but we play them two more times in the next 3 seasons, once down there. WHY??????? What possible good does this do for State football? We should be playing Duke those 3 times over 4 seasons instead of a team that has no business on our schedule, period. Basketball is one thing- you can get one great player and he can keep you in the game with anyone, but football takes an army of talent to do that.

    If we HAVE to play these teams, they why don’t we instead play App State, Western Carolina or Elon, and at least keep it in-state so that local fans can come?

    Gottfried may save the day by parachuting out of a plane at the half; there’s little reason otherwise to go to this glorified scrimmage. However, if Lee Fowler also jumped out of the plane, without a parachute, they could sell 500,000 tickets to this game.

  18. RabidWolf 09/15/2011 at 6:11 AM #

    Lamar…..of the tri-lambdas?

  19. camel77 09/15/2011 at 7:07 PM #

    NCStatePride

    At least one of the transfer had some talent, he made the Big 10 rookie team and them decided to transfer. The other had enough talent to receive an offer frombsome big-time Division 1 program.

  20. Bellyfullasoul 09/17/2011 at 10:43 AM #

    We need to welcome South Alabama to D1 competition with a bang. They are representing their conference and coming out of the gates to prove something. We haven’t proved a thing yet this year except unpreparedness. We need to completely go all out in this game and never release the throttle. Our nancya** version of football so far this year needs to turn around today. Let’s hope O’Brien really pissed in their cornflakes this week

  21. JSRy2k 09/17/2011 at 12:44 PM #

    I agree pass defense needs to improve but see it differently:
    The front seven MUST PRESSURE THE QB. COWDOG mentioned finishing off blitzes, and when we did get in Price’s face the results of those passes were much different than when we produced no pressure. This week both TOB and Archer emphasized the importance of pass rush to our defense and that it lacked vs. the Deacs.

    I love how pissed off TOB is with the team. Let’s see what adjustments the staff can implement over the next couple weeks…

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