With college football season just around the corner, NC State touted its growing gridiron culture to the media at the 2022 ACC Football Kickoff. After a solid season in 2021, head coach Dave Doeren and the Pack asserted their intention to build the program into a consistent contender.
After a potential 10-win season was cut short by a bowl cancellation, the Wolfpack is dead set on running it back in 2022. With several key defensive pieces returning to the roster, NC State is primed to make waves this season.
“Nobody likes feeling like you got the raw deal, which several of our teams have probably felt that way,” Doeren said. “It’s going to come full circle, and we’re going to be smiling at the end of it, and I believe that whole-heartedly. It’s about how you act and how you respond and who you are with. I’m with three incredible people today that I get to go to work with a great staff and a great locker room, and that’s going to come full circle.”
Those “three incredible people” are redshirt junior quarterback Devin Leary, graduate linebacker Isaiah Moore and junior linebacker Drake Thomas, who also represented the Pack. Each of the trio is positioned to lead the charge for NC State this season.
Offensively, Leary’s stellar 2021 season put him on the map as one of the best gunslingers in the country. The 6-foot-1, 215-pound field general tossed 35 touchdowns and just five interceptions a season ago, showcasing his pinpoint accuracy and playmaking ability.
On the defensive side, Moore and Thomas combine with redshirt junior Payton Wilson to form one of the best linebacking corps in the country. This abundance of returning talent has the Pack focused on resuming its pursuit of greatness in 2022.
“It’s not like we won the ACC a year ago and we’re back here and now we’re gonna do it again,” Doeren said. “We need to get there still. It’s a team that’s very hungry to prove that they’re that good, and they want to get on the field and earn it. I think that’s what’s fun about them. That’s part of our culture. It’s not a privileged, entitled culture. It’s a culture of earning things and being a teammate and helping others.”
The players feel that hunger as well. Thomas in particular made his college debut in a disappointing 4-8 campaign in 2019 and helped use that proverbial agony of defeat to turn the program’s mentality around.
“We won four games that year so that kind of speaks for itself,” Thomas said. “After that, it was a hopeless feeling. Your first taste of college football — you can go look at the scores, we were getting blown out — was getting punched in the mouth. I never want that feeling again, whether it was in the building the relationships that we had between coaches and players, whatever it was, and since then we’ve been constantly building on it and trying to make it better which is a great place to be.”
After bouncing back in 2020 and 2021, NC State sets its sights on an ACC title. For Doeren, the Pack is on the precipice, just one or two plays away from reaching that goal.
“Whether it’s a defensive play, an offensive play, or a special teams play, we lost two one-possession games. … There’s a lot of mistakes that happen on both sides. At the end it’s going to come down to one player making sometimes a routine play that changes the outcome of the game. For us, it’s just doing that repetitively. You have to do it in every game you play in the conference.”
The conference schedule is highlighted by a rematch against Clemson in Death Valley as well as road games with East Carolina and UNC-Chapel Hill, at each end of the schedule, respectively. With the Pack looking to build on last season’s success, another area for improvement is its road games.
“I think the biggest thing is starting fast,” Leary said. “We got to get our offense rolling a little bit faster. Instead of waiting for them to punch us, [we need it] go out there and punch them first.”
Whether in Death Valley, “Carter-Finley North,” or Carter-Finley itself, NC State football has the opportunity to assert itself on big stages in 2022. With the Pack’s veteran talent comes great expectations, and Doeren knows his team will have to bring its A game every week.
“Last year’s stats don’t win this year’s games, so we need to go do it and go out there,” Doeren said. “I think these guys understand that it’s not easy. I mean, every time you go out there, you’re going to have to prove it. You have a circle on you on the calendar now. You know you’re in a little different position. With the notoriety and the stats comes people’s best efforts, right? That’s what we’re up against right now.”
