NC State will try to move forward after a ‘frustrating’ loss to Mississippi State
One word can describe the mood after N.C. State’s 24-10 loss to Mississippi State: Frustrating.
The coaches, the players, the fan base, all frustrated with the outcome. Not just the loss, but the way it all went down.
The Wolfpack (1-1) have shown a tendency to drop early season, hyped-up road games. The frustrating part about this one is N.C. State did more to hurt itself than Mississippi State (2-0). In order to beat an SEC opponent, on the road, at night, a team has to play complimentary football.
All three phases of the game (offense, defense, special teams) struggled Saturday night inside Davis Wade Stadium. With cowbells ringing loudly, the Pack gave up a 100-yard touchdown on the opening kick. The defense, one week after pitching a shutout, surrendered 17 points. Seventeen points should be enough to win on most nights, but not on a night when the offense struggled.
N.C. State actually outgained MSU 335-316, but went 1-for-3 in the red zone, including a missed field goal and an interception.
“It’s a team loss,” head coach Dave Doeren said. “It starts with the head coach, me, all the time.”
Doeren is still searching for that big Power 5, non-conference win to put on his resume. This was one when it felt like N.C. State was the better team, if only briefly. The Wolfpack defense held the Bulldogs to five yards in the first quarter. The N.C. State offense moved into scoring territory twice in the first quarter, quieting the cowbells. But they came up empty twice — an interception on a jump pass attempt by running back Ricky Person Jr. and a missed field goal by Christopher Dunn.
The defense eventually got tired of chasing down the Mississippi State receivers — nine different players caught at least one pass — and the offense was kept out of the end zone for three quarters.
“You have to score points on the road playing a team like this,” Doeren said. “Playing like a team like this that can score and will score. I thought we did a good job keeping ourselves in the game as bad as we were. You have to play complimentary football and we didn’t do that tonight, we just didn’t.”
That has to be the most frustrating part for all parties involved. N.C. State had its moments of success, but couldn’t put enough of them together to get anything going consistently.
“It’s always frustrating, just being able to move the ball the way we did and lack of execution on finishing drives,” quarterback Devin Leary said. “That’s really what hurt us. I mean, give a ton of credit to our defense for getting us the ball back, giving us chances and then on our behalf we just failed to execute on those chances.”
With the defense playing lights up for most of the first half, the N.C. State offense had seven straight empty drives. The defense gave up touchdowns on consecutive drives at the end of the second quarter and first drive of the third, unable to maintain the same intensity that grounded the air raid early on.
“Overall, we just have to do a better job of playing off each other,” safety Tanner Ingle said. “And that’s that.”
Doeren’s biggest message to his team was the opportunities they missed. He chose to use a basketball analogy to describe what went wrong in Starkville.
“We have to make our layups,” Doeren said. “I thought we had several that we didn’t make, offensively and then we got frustrated. I told them no one is to blame, everyone is. The whole team wins, the whole team loses. From there let’s look at the film and the opportunities that we thought we had or could have different. We have to learn from it.”
N.C. State only has two more non-conference games: Furman next weekend, Louisiana Tech on Oct. 2, with a game against Clemson in between.
The opportunity for a Doeren-led team to pick up that P5 out-of-conference win will have to wait until next season. Wins over the Paladins and Bulldogs won’t settle the restless locals. But the maturity of this team promises not to let one loss burn down the ship and turn into two or three or four.
“It’s all about the response,” Leary said. “I think it all starts tomorrow, just being able to wipe everything that happened tonight, put it in the past and just learn from it.”
