In Duke’s Mayo Bowl, N.C. State offense can’t make chicken salad out of you-know-what
Believers in nominative determinism would say that Dave Doeren’s decision to punt from midfield with four minutes to play Friday may have been influenced by the bowl game’s title sponsor. That punt had all the spice of the game’s namesake emulsion of soybean oil and egg yolks.
But you can’t make chicken salad out of you-know-what without mayonnaise, and that’s all N.C. State was trying to do on offense in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
With MJ Morris too sore to play, Ben Finley struggling to throw downfield, balls bouncing off his receivers’ hands right to the opposition, and a nonexistent running game, the odds of converting on fourth-and-9 were worse than the odds of the Wolfpack’s dominant defense scoring off a turnover.
“If we’re ripping the ball and catching it, we would have gone for it,” Doeren said.
Down four, a fifth Christopher Dunn field goal wasn’t going to do anything for N.C. State, and that was the only way the Wolfpack could dent the scoreboard Friday. So the Wolfpack punted and hoped its defense would bail it out, which made this third straight bowl loss, 16-12 to Maryland, very much the story of this season writ large.
Whether because of injuries — Finley entered the season as N.C. State’s fourth-string quarterback — or persistently unimaginative play-calling or an inability to catch the passes that were thrown on target, the Wolfpack’s offense always struggled to keep up with a defense that, for the most part, lived up to its billing as the best at N.C. State in two decades.
“We wanted to be the best defense in the conference. We felt like we accomplished that,” linebacker Isaiah Moore said. “We wanted to be the best defense in the nation. We slipped up a couple times at that. But as far as us as a group, if you watch it on tape, we flew around and gave it our all with every snap. People were afraid to play us at times. We made our mark.”
It will be difficult to replicate that on defense, without the phenomenal linebacking group of Moore and Drake Thomas and Payton Wilson, but there could hardly be more room for improvement on the other side of the ball with Morris coming back — Doeren said next year was definitely part of the calculus in holding him out Friday — and new offensive coordinator Robert Anae replacing Tim Beck, now the head coach at Coastal Carolina.
Anae built dynamic attacks at Syracuse and Virginia, the former in instant, just-add-water fashion this season. N.C. State is counting on him to do the same, whether that’s with Morris at quarterback or a rumored transfer like Virginia quarterback Brennan Armstrong, who flourished under Anae two seasons ago and foundered without him this year.
“I think it’s time for us to change and evolve,” Doeren said. “It couldn’t come at a better time.”
But this season ended the same frustrating way it started, with a defense capable of winning games nearly single-handedly and the nation’s best kicker being unable to drag along an offense that, even at its best, never hit its stride and was barely functional on Friday. The Wolfpack had 27 rushing yards and went 5-for-18 on third down in what was otherwise an eminently winnable game.
After N.C. State kept Maryland out of the end zone with an incredible goal-line stand to start the game — two punishing Tanner Ingle tackles and a Thomas sack on fourth down — Finley’s pass for an open Darryl Jones over the middle bounced off Jones’ hands and right to a Maryland defender. That set the tone for the day, an afternoon of old-man football full of punts and field goals.
You’d maybe expect more fireworks in this long-awaited reunion of old ACC rivals, but this was less turning the clock back to 2010 and more turning the clock back to 1950, almost — it was 16-13 that year, an N.C. State win.
“That was a classic, old school, old ACC, Maryland-N.C. State rivalry game,” Maryland coach Mike Locksley said. “You think about those games, and I took part in quite a few of them, and they always come down to the end. Never been easy. It’s Terps vs. Wolfpack, man. I grew up on those games.”
Without relitigating Maryland’s departure, it’s nice to see the garish state-flag unis back on the field against an ACC opponent, and to the Terrapins’ credit, they have future football games scheduled against Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.
As for the Wolfpack, this was a bit of an end of N.C. State’s own era. This team had been building toward this season since that dismal 2019 campaign, getting better and better each year, and came into this fall with the highest of expectations.
Those expectations weren’t met, for reasons within and without N.C. State’s control, starting with quarterback Devin Leary’s season-ending injury that deprived the Wolfpack of the preseason ACC player of the year. The Wolfpack ended up using four different quarterbacks and still won eight games, thanks in large part to that fearsome defense.
The Wolfpack went down fighting to the end, in triple overtime in Chapel Hill to defeat its fiercest rivals and in a losing effort in Charlotte, even if the best way to fight Friday was to put the defense back on the field and hope for the best.
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This story was originally published December 30, 2022 at 6:08 PM with the headline "In Duke’s Mayo Bowl, N.C. State offense can’t make chicken salad out of you-know-what."
