Game Thread: Wolfpack Football at South Alabama Jaguars

09/26/2015Wufpacker'15 Football171

The undefeated Pack (3-0) ventures on the road for the second straight week as it travels way down south, nearly to the Gulf of Mexico. Mobile, Alabama to be exact. Mobile is the 3rd largest city in Alabama, is the only saltwater seaport in the state, and is considered a Gulf Coast cultural center.

Seriously.

Nonetheless, folks down there would still consider us yankees way up here in North Kackalacky.

Anywhoo….8pm on ESPNNews, the Pack will face the South Alabama Jaguars. Or even Jaguras perhaps, if we can get a last minute venue change to London.*

USA (2-1) is coming off a big-ish overtime road win at San Diego State. Not that the Aztecs appear to be their semi-usual selves this year so far….but still.

–

Despite being a 17 point road favorite in Mobile, the Pack is not without some issues that deserve your attention.

The offensive line, already an area of question for the Pack even during pre-season camp, has already become pretty banged up with each successive week and is getting shuffled yet again to fill holes this week….

RALEIGH-Tyler Jones will get his first career start for N.C. State on Saturday at South Alabama.

It’s probably three games later than the redshirt freshman offensive lineman had expected before the season began.

Jones (6-3, 300) had won the starting left tackle job in the spring. He was displaced in August by redshirt freshman Will Richardson.

[snip]

“I told Tyler, it’s going to be a matter of time,” Doeren said. “You just need to be ready when it comes.”

Barr was injured in the second half of N.C. State’s 35-0 win over Eastern Kentucky on Sept. 12 and sat out last week’s 38-14 win at Old Dominion.

Kennedy started for Barr at left guard against the Monarchs and played 51 of 79 offensive snaps before leaving with a possible concussion.

Despite all the changes up front, the Wolfpack’s rushing numbers have been strong the past two weeks. N.C. State ran for 199 yards against Eastern Kentucky and 256 against Old Dominion.

Some useless information (Streaks)

Wolfpack Football is currently on a six game win streak dating back to the end of last season. I’m told that the Pack is also 6-0 vs Vegas during that stretch, though admittedly I haven’t done the research to verify that (so don’t yell at me if it’s not true, basically). The six game streak is the longest for the Pack, since it opened the ’02 campaign 9-0.

It is also the longest current win streak of any ACC team (tied with Clemson).

The Pack is also on a four game ROAD win streak (’02 also happens to be the last time THAT happened).

Technically, one of those was a neutral site (UCF in St. Pete for the Bitcoin), but since it WAS UCF in St. Pete, I say we count it. The last time the Pack lost away from Carter-Finley was at Louisville on 10/18/14. Since then, in addition to UCF in last year’s Bitcoin Bowl, Carolina, ‘Cuse and ODU have fallen at home to the visiting Wolfpack.

Should the Pack prevail in Mobile tonight, the five game road streak would be the longest since Dr. Lou was drawing a paycheck from the State of NC.

Some more, even more useless information (Rankings and such)

The Pack is unranked, not surprisingly, in spite of an unblemished record thus far. They are in the “Also Receiving Votes” category in both major polls, however. Though to be fair, they have been pretty much all along, and have even lost some ground in the AP poll in spite of 3 lopsided wins (Damned sportswriters, with your rock and roll 8-track tapes and your makeout parties)**.

But again, not surprising. Or is it? No, it’s not.

On the other hand, even though NCAAF doesn’t utilize the same RPI type rankings like basketball and baseball do, WarrenNolan.com does have their own NPI metric, which is always essentially useless due to how the NCAAF post-season is constructed. And this early in the season, it’s not only useless but also pretty meaningless.

Nonetheless…

The NC State Wolfpack Football team happens to be ranked #5 in said rankings this week (that’s nationally, just to clarify). Not only that, but the Pack is sporting a very surprising SOS of #13 (ie, 5th most difficult of the 30+ FBS teams which are still undefeated…more or less). At least such is true as I type this prior to any of Saturday’s games getting underway…lotsa shifting will happen this early as various teams win and lose.

But…interesting, no?

Other Semi-Interesting Filler

The Wolfpack will reportedly don their all white head to toe road unis tonight.

All white everything is how the Pack is making this week’s Fashion #STATEMENT presented by @belk pic.twitter.com/Pwp0hRJMbe

— NC State Football (@PackFootball) September 22, 2015

Mark Gottfried’s father, Joe Gottfried, was a long time AD at South Alabama. He retired in ’09, two years before Gott came to NCSU, but was the AD who negotiated the 2 for 1 football deal with the Pack.

You can head over to the SFN forums and read about Wolfpack Football Legend Adrian Wilson here. It’s very much worth the time to read the linked article if you haven’t already done so. (Hat tip to Pack78 for linking this for all of us to read).

Highlights from last week’s ODU win.

This is always a fun one to watch 🙂

And wrong sport, yes…but Yogi Berra deserves a shout out that wasn’t done by some know nothing journalist in the past four days, most of whom don’t know shit about his career and merely did a wiki search on some of his (in)famous sayings…

—-

Footnotes (AKA, explanations for some of my above insanity/stupidity…which doesn’t discount said instanity/stupidity, only explains it)

*Jaguras….

Hee hee…never gets old. NFL’s Jags should make the “Jaguars Jumble” a weekly contest to boost fan interest. I would submit “Suga Jar”. And then turn down the free tix to see them play when declared the winner by a landslide.

** Rock and Roll 8-tracks….