Is NC State football ready? Delayed and disrupted, it’s time to kick off, ready or not
Even a week late, there’s still a certain amount of serendipity surrounding the reality that N.C. State is even in a position to open the season Saturday against Wake Forest. The combination of a campus full of coronavirus clusters, contact-tracing and quarantining kept pushing the Wolfpack behind schedule. When N.C. State returned to practice after an eight-day break, it had only 45 players available.
“These kids,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said Thursday, “have been through a lot.”
Nevertheless, duty calls. Here comes Wake Forest, its practices largely uninterrupted and with the hard-earned experience of a thorough working-over by Clemson. These are the kind of inequities forced upon everyone by the unusual circumstances of playing football during a pandemic. The bell will toll for everyone, eventually. It just happened to toll early for N.C. State.
So there’s been a bit of retooling on the fly of a practice plan and schedule that had already been retooled on the fly. Not only has the Wolfpack had to do without dozens of players at a time, it’s had to be wary of overworking the players who were available.
At least in the final week leading up to this opener, the Wolfpack has had a more-or-less usual group of 105 players available. But even with the scheduled opener against Virginia Tech pushed back, N.C. State has had to cram almost a month’s worth of work into that week.
It’s been a long slog even to this point. As students got back on campus, the waves of COVID-19 that tore through West Raleigh did not leave the football team unscathed. There were 27 positive tests within the athletic department that required dozens of football players to quarantine — and, eventually, the Wolfpack had to shut down practice and push back its opener.
“The day-to-day change in the schedule was the hardest thing for the players,” Doeren said. “They’re just used to routine this time of year. For me, the contact-tracing piece, that was the hardest. One kid is asymptomatic, he eats lunch with three guys, the guys around him passed a COVID test and feel great but they can’t come to the building for 14 days. That happened a lot during the period the students came back.”
Meanwhile, Doeren took heat in August for some poorly phrased comments that downplayed the potential harm of the virus to football players, but the point he was trying to make then — that many of the health complaints his players make at this time of year also happen to mirror COVID symptoms — turned out to be valid, in his experience.
“You have to hold the kid out until they pass a test,” Doeren said. “Runny nose, scratchy throat, headache, you name it. My recollection of fall camp was I had a headache every day as a player.”
Given the circumstances, presumably he had a headache every day as a coach this time around.
Everyone’s going to have to deal with this at one point or another, the disruption and the difficulties inherent in trying to navigate a football season in a pandemic. North Carolina found that out Thursday morning when Charlotte canceled 48 hours out. If Virginia Tech was in any way aggrieved by the hassle N.C. State’s problems caused the Hokies, their comeuppance was only days away when students returned to campus there and Virginia Tech found itself in the same fix. That passed the inconvenience onto Virginia, tumbling through the ACC like water over rocks.
N.C. State, at least, can say that it has already been through it. Ready or not, it’s finally time.
“Are we where we want to be? I think we’ve done as much as we can,” Doeren said. “We need to go play football now.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 9:28 AM with the headline "Is NC State football ready? Delayed and disrupted, it’s time to kick off, ready or not."
