that ND didn’t do anything they didn’t prepare for, which I read as not a reasonable explanation of anything but simply throwing his players to the wolfpack.

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"F--- everyone who isn't us."
#Team128

It was actually a little jarring when they ran out of the tunnel and looked so much like NIU, but I figured that was just my emotional reaction, and not a real thing.

But Doeren did that on purpose?

NC State rolled into town with head coach Dave Doeren trying to invoke some NIU magic, wearing a spookily reminiscent uniform as a tribute his former school. Although ND's offense sort of sleepwalked its way through the first half, the entire team came to life and ended up rolling the Wolfpack.

Chris Ash invoked his inner John Kreese, striking hard and striking fast to a no mercy assault. Quarterback CJ Bailey had the worst day of his season, going 17/30 for 186 yards and throwing 3 picks. Most of his production came on a single busted route where he connected with Terrell Anderson for a 45 yard touchdown strike. Otherwise, Bailey was held to 4.9 YPA on the day. The Irish pass rush lived rent free in their backfield. While they only sacked Bailey 3 times, the defense registered 3 hits and 11 additional pressures. Ironically, ND did much better generating pressure without blitzing Bailey, demonstrating the power of playing a sound pass and coverage in tandem. ND also held NC State to 3.42 YPC (I'm dropping Bailey's yards which drop this to 1.8 YPC). Defensively, this was a complete ass kicking. And like that, the narrative on Chris Ash and his unit are shifting. This is increasingly looking like a unit that had a bad quarter against Texas A&M, rather than a bad unit. Personally, I've upgraded Ash to "Don't Fire" and I'm at a point where I'm not actively scouring liquidated coaching staffs for an upgrade. The vision for the unit seems to be materializing and it's doing something important -- getting pressure with 4.

USC will challenge this unit, but I'm less concerned about the D than the O this Saturday.
It's hard to criticize an offense that put up more than enough points to win the game, but the offense didn't make it easy on itself. They wound up scoring 4 TDs and 2 FGs on 12 competitive drives, foregoing 2 makeable FGs on other drives. If there's something that was disappointing, it was that NC State elected to "take away the run" and were able to do so. At times, I thought NC State was also able to drop out of 7 or 8 man fronts into decent coverage. Carr and Fields seem to be consistently struggling to connect on a slant. Denbrock, Rudolph, and Seider may have to get in their bag a bit and think about some run counters to heavy fronts -- perhaps some outside or split zone or mix in a few counters. When you take out the wildcat stuff, I do think the "lack of running game creativity" charge may hold up. My guess is that Freeman wanted the Offense to keep things fairly vanilla ahead of the USC game, but I'd also acknowledge that statement is about 50% cope.

My sight and sound of the week was at the player walk. We happened to stand across from Eli Raridon's grandma who was wearing a shirt that said "Eli's grandma" and she had about a half dozen friends wearing shirts that said "With Eli's grandma." They were all having a blast and got a big hug from the TE when he came by. Awesome to see him have a big game.

James Franklin bit the dust in Happy Valley and it's wild to think how quickly things turn in CFB. One day you're heading in a semi-final playoff game. Less than half a season later you're fired. UCLA must have pulled some Freaky Friday shit and stolen that man's mojo. I have absolutely no idea what they'll do nor will they upgrade, but to my inexpert eye this looks like a case where they'll spend $100m on buy outs and it won't be clear that they've upgraded their coaching staff. Good luck, PSU! I suspect you're walking down the post-Solich Nebraska path.

On to USC as they say!

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Freeman's got so much riz they need to call him Aura Parseghian