Why NC State’s improbable win over Pitt was really won the Monday before kickoff
College football fans witnessed N.C. State cover 80 yards in 1:44 to come from behind and defeat No. 24 Pittsburgh on the road, 30-29.
The victory ended a little after 3 p.m. Saturday, but Wolfpack head coach Dave Doeren said that game was won the previous Monday.
Coming off a 21-point defeat at Virginia Tech the weekend prior, Doeren talked about how his team was humbled against the Hokies. Playing their first game of the season, Virginia Tech manhandled the Wolfpack up front, jumped out to a 21-point lead in the first quarter and never looked back.
In a way, Doeren might have seen it coming. The previous week, fresh off a season-opening win over Wake Forest, Doeren left practice that Tuesday knowing the team hadn’t played its best. Maybe they were complacent; understandable for a young team that hadn’t won a game since Oct. 10 of 2019.
Young teams handle wins differently. Doeren saw some sloppiness in practice leading up to Virginia Tech and felt like it would come back to haunt them. It did.
“I didn’t feel like we had the same edge in practice,” Doeren said leading up to the slaughter in Blacksburg. “I thought we were sloppy. I didn’t think we were the same as we were the Tuesday before preparing for Wake and that they needed to get their stuff together or they would pay for it, and we did. We didn’t prepare the same way.”
But sometimes teams, especially young teams, need that hard lesson early on. Doeren explained they needed to get burned early to show players they play how they practice, and if they had a bad week, they’ll get beat.
N.C. State learned its lesson and Doeren immediately saw a better product on the practice field last week. That gave him a better feeling about their trip to the Steel City.
A better week of preparation led to the team’s third win over a ranked team in the Doeren era. N.C. State didn’t have a turnover for the first time in 11 games. Quarterback Devin Leary picked apart Pittsburgh top-ranked defense for more than 300 yards and the defense stuffed the Panthers on a goal-line stand in the third quarter. The product on the field in Week 3 was night and day from the product in Week 2.
“That first win, we got a little complacent,” tight end Cary Angeline said. “Coach Doeren really made an emphasis after the Virginia Tech loss to have a real hard week of practice, real physical week of practice. That’s what we did.”
It showed. After surrendering more than 300 yards rushing to the Hokies, the Wolfpack gave up just 92 to Pitt. On the other side of the ball, Tim Beck’s game plan kept Leary clean and the Panthers’ aggressive defense on its heels.
“For us we took the Virginia Tech game to heart,” junior center Grant Gibson said. “We saw that we didn’t play our best football. Our goal each week is to improve from the past week. We all saw some things on tape that we wanted to fix and we just wanted to go out there and play better as a group.”
The Wolfpack next head to Charlottesville to take on Virginia (1-1, 1-1). N.C State hasn’t done well in trips to UVA. In the previous 12 games in Charlottesville, the Wolfpack has gone 3-9, but Doeren ihas never lost the next game after beating a ranked team.
This young team can’t hang their hats on that. There is no room to get complacent again.
“You can’t let a win on the road get to their head,” Doeren said. “We can’t at any time get a big head because of one thing they’ve done well.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 2:40 PM with the headline "Why NC State’s improbable win over Pitt was really won the Monday before kickoff."
