In a year as unpredictable as 2020, you can still count on NC State blowing the big game
In a season when nothing has gone as expected in the ACC and nobody really knows anything, at least there’s a heartbreaking N.C. State loss under the lights to set your calendar by. That much, at least, is familiar at a time when little else is.
The Wolfpack had Miami all but put away, still in the fight for a spot in the ACC championship game, even held the Hurricanes to a give-up field goal in the fourth quarter when it looked — at the time, anyway — like Miami needed a touchdown there to stay in it. N.C. State had taken everything Miami had and thrown it right back.
Then it all fell apart in the space of a few minutes, the final few minutes.
Two plays less than a minute apart turned a win into a loss: Joshua Pierre-Louis missed a tackle on a short pass that turned into Miami’s 54-yard go-ahead touchdown, and Bailey Hockman’s slightly overthrown pass bounced off Emeka Emezie’s hands and right to a Miami defender to seal a 44-41 loss.
This wasn’t like the North Carolina loss, where N.C. State started slowly and never caught up. The Wolfpack did everything it needed to do to put that game behind it in this season for short memories. It led this shootout throughout the second half, right up to the final few minutes. As with other subjects looming large in the collective consciousness at the moment, you don’t get to claim victory after 57 minutes. You have to see it through to the end.
There have been many of these late reversals in night games at Carter-Finley in recent years, and this fit right in with Clemson and Wake Forest and the other Clemson game and so many more. You could even go all the way back to that infamous Miami game in 2004, when the whole world seemed to be watching and Carter-Finley was an absolute powder keg of a bear pit, to mix a metaphor or two, and Devin Hester broke the speed of sound returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown to deflate all of it.
N.C. State went into this one with a chance, still, to make the ACC title game — especially if it could knock Miami down a peg in the process — and did just about everything it needed to do to stay alive except finish off the Hurricanes.
Miami, having lost only to Clemson, with a fearsome defense giving up 22 points and change per game, somehow gave up more than that to N.C. State … in the first half … while making a backup quarterback who didn’t make it through the first half of his last start look like Trevor Lawrence.
And that quarterback, Hockman, couldn’t get anything going against North Carolina, which has made nearly every other quarterback it has faced, from Phil Jurkovec to Hendon Hooker to Jordan Travis to Brennan Armstrong look like … Trevor Lawrence.
Hockman, who stepped in for Devin Leary in the opener and played well enough in the first half to beat Wake Forest, then struggled when thrown back in after Leary was injured, was nothing short of spectacular Friday night. He somehow managed to keep pace with Miami’s spectacular D’Eriq King — but not teammate Thayer Thomas, whose one pass went for a touchdown … to Hockman.
But it wasn’t enough: N.C. State dared King to throw it deep, and he did, dropping balls into the end zone from high in the sky, even if all the work on the game-winner was done on the ground.
Lawrence, it should be noted, won’t play for Clemson on Saturday at Notre Dame as he remains in the COVID-19 protocol, which is the source of all this uncertainty in the first place. Without the usual slate of nonconference walkovers to work out the kinks, with everyone jumping right into the deep end of the pool, chaos is the rule.
So are higher stakes. There were seven teams that went into the weekend with realistic aspirations of playing in Charlotte, and these were two of them. Miami needed this game to stay ahead of several two-loss teams in the second-place conversation with Saturday’s Clemson-ND loser; N.C. State needed a win to remain in the conversation, helping its own cause by knocking Miami down a notch.
The fact that there were seven teams in that conversation going into Friday is pretty typical for this time of year, except it’s usually Clemson and six Coastal Division teams doing the talking. There’s nothing typical about Atlantic teams like N.C. State and Wake Forest having a shot, and obviously Notre Dame is completely off the radar outside of a pandemic.
And then there were six.
N.C. State saw whatever chances it had fizzle in the final three minutes Friday night, the hopes of yet another Wolfpack season raised in the late hours of the evening, only to be summarily dashed, not for the first time.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 11:47 PM.
