NC State football has not had the best start this year, but a recent home win against the Syracuse Orange has given the Wolfpack some momentum heading into the Boston College game this week. While not a stellar record, sitting at 4-2 is not a bad situation for this young team. In fact, NC State actually has one of the youngest rosters in all of college football. With all of the youth on the team, there is a good chance for the Pack to dramatically improve its play as the year goes on.
Expectations coming into the 2019 season were very mixed, with fans knowing the departures of key players like Germaine Pratt and Ryan Finley were going to hurt the team. However, at the same time, head coach Dave Doeren has recently been bringing in stellar recruiting classes, with many of the new recruits expected to make immediate impacts. With better recruiting classes comes bigger expectations, and that can be felt across the entire fan base.
Wolfpack fans seem to be waiting for Doeren and his staff to show something; show that his new players are capable of achieving more than just being occasionally ranked in the top 25. What fans want is to be able, at the very least, to stay competitive with Clemson in the ACC.
Right now, the state of the ACC is abysmal. Outside of Clemson, the rest of the conference has become seemingly a running joke to the other Power Five conferences, with Clemson being the only ACC team currently ranked in the top 25.
Historically, the ACC has been extremely top-heavy in most years, with power house schools like Virginia Tech, Clemson, and Florida State taking home most ACC championships. While this has been the case, there typically has still been more than one team that is capable of winning the conference from year to year. This year, that does not seem to be the case.
Clemson has a tight grip on the ACC right now, with all other schools not being able to keep up with Dabo Swinney and his program. NC State has the opportunity to take the next step and differentiate itself from the other schools over the next couple of years. With this young core being able to stay together, they might be able to at the very least become a team that can make Clemson sweat.
But first, this young core is going to need some momentum. While fans are now starting to see that this is going to be a rebuilding year, that does not mean the Pack can’t still pull off a big upset win. Sadly, that has not been something Doeren has been able to do on a consistent basis.
From 2014 to now, NC State has gone a combined 0-15 against teams that have finished ranked in the AP Top 25. While Doeren has rebuilt NC State into a program that is pumping out NFL prospects again, he still cannot seem to get that signature win that he and the fan base are looking for.
Sure, he has won some terrific games against ranked opponents such as Florida State and Louisville, but those teams would go on to have terrible finishes to their respective seasons and would not finish the year as ranked programs.
Doeren is more than capable of finally getting a signature win, but it would mean even more if that win came this year. Unfortunately, he is not going to get many chances. With the ACC having a more-so-than-usual down year, the only ranked opponent on NC State’s schedule is Clemson. However, there is a very good chance UNC will be ranked at the end of the season when the two teams meet in November.
A win against either team would give this young squad a huge boost in momentum heading into 2020. While unlikely, NC State has pulled off these types of wins before. Wolfpack fans still look at the 2011 win against Clemson and 2012 win against Florida State fondly. Back then, head coach Tom O’Brien was not nearly as consistent or as good of a coach as Doeren, but he would occasionally be able to find a way to upset a vastly superior team.
With Doeren being in his seventh year in Raleigh, Wolfpack fans are now starting to look very closely at whether the program is going to start to move forward and closer to where Clemson is. He is going to want to find his signature win sooner rather than later.
The young core on the team now will look to give Clemson a run in the next couple of years, but the time to start building momentum is now. With the quarterback job still up in the air and the team looking inconsistent, the odds are not in NC State’s favor. But as all Wolfpack fans know, Wolfpack magic can happen when you least expect it. Will magic happen this year? We’ll see.
