NC State’s first game of the 2017 season is Saturday against South Carolina in the Belk College Football Kickoff game in Charlotte; let’s take a look at how the senior-filled Pack defense will look this season.

Defensive Line

The Pack should have one of the best defensive lines in the country this year. All four starters are returning: senior defensive end Kentavius Street, senior defensive tackle Justin Jones, senior defensive tackle B.J. Hill and senior defensive end Bradley Chubb, an ESPN preseason All-American. The four projected starters combined for 20 sacks last season and if you include junior defensive end Darian Roseboro’s seven sacks, it would be a 27-sack total for last season, this same group also had 51 tackles-for-loss last season, led by 21 from Chubb.

Roseboro, who is expected to get a fair split of snaps this year, is also returning and will be valuable to the line’s success. The starters have combined for 94 career starts led by Hill with 26, the most by any player on defense.

The Wolfpack needs the defensive line to supply pressure on the quarterback and keep opponents’ run games contained in order to have the kind of success the team wants. The expectations on this group are huge but justified given that they’ve shown. At times it can dominate and the Pack can go far if it lives up to those standards.

Linebackers

The Wolfpack is bringing back both starters from a year ago: senior weak-side linebacker Airius Moore and redshirt senior Jerod Fernandez. Both Fernandez and Moore were on the field for a tremendous amount of time last year and proper fill-ins from time to time to keep Moore and Fernandez fresh could do wonders for State’s defense. Junior Riley Nicholson and redshirt junior Germaine Pratt are both ready to take some of the pressure off the hands of the two starters from a year ago.

Fernandez, who had 88 tackles last year, and Moore, who had 86, were both major reasons why NC State’s rush defense improved from 39th in 2015 to eighth in the nation a year ago and will both be crucial to any further climbing of the ranks for this defense.

Defensive Backs

The Pack’s leading tackler from a year ago, Josh Jones, is gone and has left a huge void in the Pack’s already shaky defensive backfield that ranked 82nd a year ago and losing corner Jack Tocho will not help either. The only two returning starters from a year ago are senior cornerback Mike Stevens and senior safety Shawn Boone, but considering that Stevens is out of the first game of the season due to a leg injury, the team only has one returning starter. Sophomore corner Nick McCloud and redshirt senior wide receiver-turned-cornerback Johnathan Alston will most likely be the two starters until Stephens returns. Redshirt junior Dexter Wright, a free safety, got 45 of his 99 defensive snaps on the season in the bowl game and will be starting at safety this year. At nickelback, junior Freddie Phillips Jr. could get the start despite being a special teams player a year ago; redshirt sophomore defensive back Jarius Morehead, who made just one start a year ago could also get a starting job.

Any way this defensive backfield is configured, it will be riddled with inexperience and question marks, and is the weak point of an otherwise strong NC State defense.

Despite some question marks in the secondary, a rock-solid front seven gives NC State the best defense it’s had in years, and the backbone of a team with the potential for a great season.