Dave Doeren: 'Sometimes you need to lose to enforce something that's important'

NC State head coach Dave Doeren watched his team fight back multiple times through the first few quarters against Notre Dame. But twice when the Wolfpack scored, the Fighting Irish responded with points of their own.

Then Notre Dame pushed NC State away for good with three consecutive touchdowns in the fourth quarter to put the game out of reach.

Doeren said in his Monday press conference that the Wolfpack need to be better at using momentum to their advantage.

“Every time we got momentum back, Notre Dame answered and you have to give them credit.” Doeren said. “We have to learn from that, taking advantage of momentum. But like I said, sometimes you need to enforce something that’s important. Our players do play hard. You see that. In the end, they made more plays than we did and you have to give them credit for that. The scoreboard showed it and that’s a reflection of plays not made.”

The best chance for NC State came after a touchdown cut the deficit to 24-17. The previous two times the Wolfpack had scored, the Fighting Irish had needed only three plays in less than two minutes to respond.

But this time, Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman fumbled on the second play of the next drive to give the Wolfpack great field position. But they couldn’t get a first down and then missed a 34-yard field goal.

Brennan Armstrong threw an interception on the next NS State possession and then Notre Dame rattled off its three straight touchdowns.

“We were 2 of 2 on short yardage,” Doeren said. “That was an area that we were wanting to be better in and we were. We increased our explosive plays from four to nine in that game. So again, an area we wanted to be better at. Negatives, we didn’t capitalize on field position in the first half. The defense really did a good job setting up the offense in the first half with some shorter fields that we didn’t score. We had four pre-snap fall starts, which cannot happen. Two of them killed drives.

“Had three interceptions. Obviously as the game got out of hand, I think Brennan pressed on one of them. One of them was a great throw, which was a drop that turned into an interception and the other was a shot call where we threw a fade down the sidelines just got to do a better job getting it outside. That happens sometimes when you throw deep balls. But we can’t turn the football over at that rate.”