NC State playing with ‘enthusiasm’ after another win following open week under Dave Doeren

NC State coach Dave Doeren’s Wolfpack teams have been able to use an open week in the season to their advantage over the last five seasons. When it seems like things are not going well, the Pack has taken the weekend off to adjust for the final stretch of each campaign. 

A year ago, NC State limped into the bye week at 4-3 with an “embarrassing” loss at Duke. The Pack turned its season around with an unblemished mark over the its final five games, including wins over Clemson and Miami to reach nine victories. 

Now, after the Wolfpack entered its first of two open weeks with a 4-4 mark this season, NC State seemed to find the same success in its time away from the gridiron. The Pack handled Stanford with ease in a 59-28 win this past weekend. 

Doeren thought the Pack’s record-setting point output, which was the most that NC State has ever scored in an ACC game in program history, was a good litmus test to show how the week off helped his squad. 

“59 points,” Doeren said. “Isn’t that a big sign that things changed?”

It is. The Wolfpack played one of its most complete games of the season with nine straight scoring drives, while the starting offense didn’t log a turnover. NC State’s defense, meanwhile, logged a pair of takeaways and special teams had two 45-plus-yard kickoff returns. 

So, yeah, all went well for the Wolfpack off the bye week. That improved Doeren’s record to 18-5 following NC State’s open date over the past five seasons, including last year’s remarkable turnaround. 

And while there are similarities to the Pack looking like an entirely different team out of its open week, Doeren thought they were two different situations. 

“I know that the two seasons are alike in the turnaround piece of it, but they’re two different teams with two different problems,” said Doeren, who mentioned benching Brennan Armstrong for MJ Morris before going back to the Virginia transfer down the stretch last season being different than this time around. “We’ve been searching for four quarters of football. We’ve played well in doses and not well in doses.”

NC State was able to put together a four-quarter performance against Stanford, which included the offense asserting its will over the Cardinal defense. Freshman quarterback CJ Bailey was 18-of-20 passing for 234 yards with three scores, while the Pack had two 100-yard rushers. 

To make all that happen was the Wolfpack’s offensive line, which Doeren challenged during the open date. The unit’s play had been up and down for much of the year due to a different player missing an assignment. Doeren’s goal was to have the entire group in harmony for 60 minutes, which would allow for the offense to click on all cylinders. 

And that’s what he got as the Pack offensive line earned an 84.1 pass blocking mark from Pro Football Focus, its fourth-highest grade of the season. The unit allowed just three quarterback pressures, which resulted in one sack and two hurries.

“Offensive lines that play well, play well together,” Doeren said. “I thought our guys did a really great job with that in this last game. Picking up a lot of movement, stunts, they played multiple fronts. … Our tackles did a great job against the defensive ends and that was not the case throughout the season. We’ve improved in that area.”

While the Pack improved — the scoreboard reflected the immense jump — Doeren wasn’t sure why it took this long for the team to click. He said he couldn’t put his finger on the reason, which the coach speculated could have been a byproduct of 40 new players on the roster this fall. 

“I think the leadership of the team didn’t take form and now it kind of has,” Doeren said. “Each team evolves differently. Sometimes you can just gangbusters and here you go, and sometimes it takes time.”

This season was the latter. The Wolfpack competed with Tennessee — until it didn’t late in the second quarter and it unraveled quickly in a 51-10 loss — and NC State then turned in a 59-35 loss at Clemson two weeks later. 

Doeren appeared to think the Pack had things trending in the right direction against Wake Forest with graduate quarterback Grayson McCall’s return from a concussion. But, then it didn’t.

“I thought we were going to put our foot on the gas,” Doeren said of the Wake Forest game. “And what happened to Grayson happened. That really was bigger than what people understand in the moment.”

McCall received a blow to the head that sent the signal-caller to the hospital with his third concussion in a 12-month span, later ending his playing career. NC State dropped that bout 34-30 before it lost to Syracuse the following weekend. 

Although Doeren thought NC State was trending in the right direction, the momentum of the scoreboard didn’t show that. He felt the team needed to see one contest go in its direction to turn things around. 

That’s exactly what happened in the game before the Pack’s bye, as NC State knocked off Cal 24-23 to pull back to .500 with some joy going into a week off. 

“Sometimes you just got to get a win for them to believe it,” Doeren said. “Then you get another one and you’ve got momentum. Momentum is a big thing in sports. It builds confidence. … That piece of the game is massive. Our quarterback is playing with confidence and that spreads.”

Now, NC State feels like it’s in a good spot going into this weekend’s matchup with Duke. The Wolfpack declared the final four weeks as a new season, just as it did with the final five games last fall. If the same trend continues, the Wolfpack could finish with at least eight wins for the fifth straight season under Doeren. 

But until then, Doeren knows the senior day battle with Duke won’t be an easy test. He likes the team’s mindset going into the game, but the Wolfpack coach knows his squad has an immense challenge before its second and final bye week of the season in the week after.

“We have some definite enthusiasm,” Doeren said. “We have some guys that are feeling better and are healthy and now we get to go play against a really good team. … These guys are really good. It’s going to be a really tough game.”