NC State walks right into Syracuse and allows itself to lose, 24-9

It’s an amazing thing to me, that you can spend an entire year explaining how football is your job; how you have available to you a wide variety of analytical information; how theoretically this is all useful.

You spend an entire week in between games, so you’d think the actual games would hold some value, but instead you waste everyone’s time, including that of all your players, and your offensive coordinator, as you pretend the forward pass does not exist.

Possessions in a football game are finite. There is a clock on this game; there is only so much time to work with, and only so much you can do despite your kicker’s excellent work.

This is not a particularly difficult situation to foresee, but it took half the game for NC State to even think about trying to challenge Syracuse down the field. NC State never scored a touchdown in this game; that’s not a shock. NC State walked right into Syracuse and asked, “tell me what you want?”

NC State had a chance to, not win the game in the fourth quarter, but to at least have a shot at tying it, with a two-pointer, which tells you all that is necessary about the team’s approach to this one. What an incredibly necessary amount of confidence in your offense that you’d yet to show!

If your football team ends up in that spot, you’ve failed; your entire afternoon has been a failure of coaching. There’s not another way of putting it; that’s a joke, and you should be embarrassed.

NC State spent a good 30 minutes not even trying to throw the ball down the field, which is to say that they were just trying to finesse a portion of the game, like it never happened.

What’s amazing about all of this is that, again, you can go a whole week theoretically trying to win, then spend a good solid half not even trying. What an embarrassment this was.

Dave Doeren got exactly the result he earned. He was due.