Inside who NC State’s Kurt Roper is as an offensive coordinator

By Noah Fleischman

It’s not the more than 50,000 screaming fans that seem to drive Kurt Roper’s offensive mind, or his performance under the bright lights of the dozens of stadiums that he coached in during his career. 

Sure, scoring points with an efficient offense is the goal. Finding ways to get the ball to his team’s playmakers is too. But for Roper, a quiet practice field is where the heavy lifting is done. It’s where he sets himself apart. 

Whether it was on Ole Miss’ backfields as an early quarterbacks coach with future two-time Super Bowl champion Eli Manning as his prized student or at Duke, where Roper got his start as an offensive coordinator, his ability to run a practice was unique. There’s always been a different level of intensity when it comes to Roper’s practices.

It’s something that sticks with nearly every person who has crossed paths with the career assistant, no matter how many years they are removed from him. 

“When I think of him, I don’t think of a moment in a game. I think of practice,” former head coach at Ole Miss and Duke David Cutcliffe told TheWolfpacker.com of Roper. “I think of Kurt’s intensity to get it right. That carried right through to the players.”

Cutcliffe, Roper’s former boss from the early stages of his 29-year coaching career, believes his former mentee’s ability to get what he wants done on the practice field is what led to his success as an offensive coordinator at Duke, Florida, South Carolina and now NC State. 

“I’ve watched Kurt Roper get his demands met. If you tell somebody to run through the line, you mean it. You see that it gets done,” Cutcliffe said. “That’s what makes me believe in Kurt so deeply — the fact that it’s going to get done properly.”

Roper, the Wolfpack’s quarterbacks coach for three of the last six seasons, was promoted to be the play-caller last week after NC State coach Dave Doeren relieved Robert Anae of his duties following the Military Bowl loss to East Carolina. This is his first stint running an offense in seven years, but despite being away from the controls for a sustained period, Roper’s skill set has him primed to lead the Pack’s unit. 

It all comes down to relationships for Roper, who has appeared to build a strong bond with rising sophomore quarterback CJ Bailey. The Wolfpack’s young signal-caller referenced his relationship with Roper as a reason he didn’t even entertain looking elsewhere in the transfer portal. 

Roper’s family-first mindset oozes in his quarterbacks room wherever he goes. His house is theirs. His wife, Britt, is known to bring baked goods and meals to the meeting rooms on Thursday nights. Roper is willing to do whatever it takes to help his players. It’s how he gets his message across, and in return, the offense clicks at a high level. 

“That’s becoming challenging in the world that we’re seeing in college football with the number of players that go in and out of programs, standards are being lost,” Cutcliffe said. “You have to build relationships for players to get your standards met. You can develop relationships where your standards are met consistently. … That’s the biggest challenge for a coach, and that’s one of Kurt Roper’s greatest abilities.”

Now, as Roper prepares to take the complete reins of NC State’s offense for the first time, he is tasked with improving a unit that finished 10th in total offense among the 18 ACC squads this past fall. Doeren believes that Roper, using his relationships and bright offensive mind, is the right person for the job. 

“Kurt has done a great job for us and knows what we need to do to take the next step forward as a program,” Doeren said in a statement. “He has a great relationship with our players, a great knowledge of college football and the ACC, and I’m looking forward to seeing him as a play-caller.”

But who is Kurt Roper, the offensive coordinator, on a daily basis? 

A teacher

When Jake Bentley arrived at South Carolina before the 2016 season, the four-star recruit felt like he was drinking water from a firehose. He wasn’t expected to be the starter, but Roper treated Bentley as such, looking to perfect every term in the playbook from plays to defensive identification terms. 

It took a month or two for Bentley to feel comfortable, but once he did, Roper’s ability to teach him the offense led to success shortly after. Bentley burned his redshirt six games into his freshman campaign with the Gamecocks before he beat No. 18 Tennessee in just his second-career start. 

For Bentley, who played both the 2016 and 2017 seasons with Roper as his offensive coordinator and position coach, there was a clear reason why he was able to be successful immediately: the detailed teaching from his play-caller. 

“It was that investment that he made that really helped me a lot,” Bentley told TheWolfpacker.com. “Once I was able to use those summer months when I got there, it’s what propelled me to be able to play as a freshman. I credit a lot of that to those summer meetings and really diving into those details.”

Roper thrives in meeting rooms when he’s not on the practice field, his other home away from home. The offensive coordinator’s ability to teach at a high level was a main reason why Cutcliffe was attracted to Roper as a graduate assistant at Tennessee before he followed his former boss to Ole Miss and Duke. 

Cutcliffe, a 45-year coaching veteran whose last stop was 14 seasons leading Duke’s program, saw it with Manning as Roper’s top student. Details were important, and he made sure that all of his quarterbacks were prepared for anything. The goal was to teach the players everything Roper knew, so in a game, they could operate and adjust without needing to be told anything. 

“Teaching is a unique thing, and I thought Kurt had this talent,” Cutcliffe said. “One of my things is teaching while you’re doing something, not just what and how. Kurt Roper is a really intelligent person and he grasped that. It was kind of like having a partner for me. I think we thrived together well, and I certainly know that Eli benefited from that partnership.”

Roper’s detail-oriented mindset appeared to grow under Cutcliffe. He continued with the priorities of getting everything right in the meeting room even after leaving Duke. At South Carolina, it was uber important as the Gamecocks looked to compete in the SEC on a weekly basis. 

It was drilled into Bentley’s mindset to the extent that he can’t think of football any differently now. The former quarterback is now the co-offensive coordinator at Rock Hill (S.C.) High, and Roper’s teaching has been ingrained in his own. 

“He was able to truly detail things in a way that was easy to understand,” said Bentley, who spent up to three hours a day watching film without Roper to be ready for the offensive coordinator’s comprehensive thought process. “I always try to have a detailed plan in everything I do, and I think that’s reflective of how he operated.”

For Cutcliffe, an old-school coach with an offensive mindset, Roper’s teaching acumen is a key piece of his track record as a successful offensive coordinator. 

“He’s a talented play-caller, but more importantly, he’s a talented teacher,” Cutcliffe said. “The magic is not always in the play-calling, there are some fundamental elements to that that he really understood.”

‘Players, not plays’

While Roper is one to create relationships and run a detailed preparation gauntlet, his mindset as a play-caller on game day is a simple one: “Players, not plays.”

In key situations, including third downs and in the red zone, Roper isn’t thinking about the perfect play call. Instead, he’s always thinking about who to get the ball to in order to execute at the highest level on that given play.

“He fully believes that,” former Duke quarterback Anthony Boone told TheWolfpacker.com. “Let’s find a way to get the ball to the guy that’s going to make our offense successfully move the ball.” 

Roper’s offenses, especially with the Blue Devils, reflect that. 

Quarterback Thaddeus Lewis finished as the program’s all-time leader in pass attempts (1,510), pass completions (877), passing yards (10,065) and passing touchdowns (67). Boone was the team’s winningest quarterback with 19 victories with 5,789 passing yards and 58 career touchdowns. Wide receiver Jamison Crowder, meanwhile, set the single-season program record for receptions (108) and receiving yards (1,360) in 2013. 

Duke’s 2013 campaign also demonstrated Roper’s desire to create a balanced offense. The Blue Devils scored a program-best 60 touchdowns, including 26 passing and 28 rushing — the first time the school had more than 20 in each department. 

After six seasons at Duke, Roper moved on to Florida for a season, where the Gators featured an offense that remained balanced. Florida averaged 179.9 passing yards and 187.7 rushing yards per game with quarterback Jeff Driskel at the helm. 

Roper’s stint in Gainesville was brief before his next — and most recent — offensive coordinator job at South Carolina for two seasons. The Gamecocks, which boasted Bentley, the young and promising quarterback, aired the ball out. South Carolina averaged at least 213 passing yards per game during both of his seasons there. 

And Bentley, like Bailey going into his sophomore year in 2025, made a leap after being thrown into the fire as a freshman. He threw for 1,420 yards with 9 touchdowns and 4 interceptions in seven starts during his first season before he racked up 2,794 passing yards with 18 touchdowns and 12 interceptions the following year.

While Roper hasn’t called an offense since that 2017 campaign, which South Carolina went 9-4 with a 5-3 mark in the SEC, his tenure from the stop at Colorado (2018) and the six seasons at NC State appears to have prepared him for this opportunity. 

Boone, a noted quarterback trainer in Charlotte, said he has seen Roper’s offensive mindset evolve since he arrived with the Wolfpack. Roper has a quarterback’s brain as a former collegiate signal-caller at Rice, and that is reflected in his offensive system. The scheme leans on the quarterback to make the right decisions with protections and run-pass options. 

While Roper has a clear idea of how he wants to run an offense, Boone said the coordinator is never boxed in by that. Instead, he’s open to using the players he has at his disposal to make it successful. 

“From year to year, our offense evolved based off of players, based off of what we had, based off of what we did well at that time,” Boone said. “It’s friendly for quarterbacks once you get it. It puts a lot of responsibility on the quarterback.”

Roper has a bevy of offensive weapons on the roster at NC State, led by rising redshirt sophomore wide receiver Noah Rogers and running back Hollywood Smothers, senior tight end Justin Joly, and of course Bailey, among others. Based on his history, Roper will likely look to feed the hot hand from week to week.

“There are times you don’t think plays, you think players,” Cutcliffe said. “I think he’ll do a great job in a play-call mode of using players. … Kurt has a real understanding of that. The whole time you’re coaching football, you’re evaluating where your players are.”

Roper has eight months to work on his offense before the Wolfpack takes the field against East Carolina to open the season at Carter-Finley Stadium on Aug. 30. His promotion excited many within the Murphy Center, and the newly appointed OC has the chops to help elevate the Wolfpack’s unit to a higher level with the talent he has at his disposal. 

“As a play-caller, he’s a savage. He’s dynamic,” Boone said. “I fully know that he’s going to be exactly what NC State’s been wanting and looking for.”