COVID was not kind to NC State’s 2020 football schedule. Can the Wolfpack start fresh?
A Thursday night game always throws off the normal college football routine, even to start the season, no small adjustment in a sport that worships at the altar of routine. For N.C. State, it’s a disruption hardly worth noting considering the trouble the Wolfpack had getting the season started a year ago.
For various COVID reasons, N.C. State went from preparing to open against Louisville to Virginia Tech to Wake Forest, all in the space of a month and change. Meanwhile, a COVID outbreak on campus and within the program disrupted preseason practices to the point where starting quarterback Devin Leary started the eventual delayed opener on the bench because he hadn’t been able to practice enough.
“We had three different teams we were going to play a month before the season,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said this week. “It was crazy.”
There were ACC football teams that underwent more COVID craziness during the season, but none dealt with more at the start than N.C. State -- the beginning of what Doeren called “the most difficult season of my life as a player or a coach” -- only to rebound and gather momentum on its way to an 8-3 finish, albeit without having to run the usual Atlantic Division gauntlet.
The virus is still around, but thanks to vaccines and our collective adjustments to life during a pandemic, N.C. State is actually starting this season from where it expected to start the season, against who it expected to start the season, with fans in the stands.
“It was great to have a normal fall camp and actually coach football in the preseason,” Doeren said, an unexceptional statement to make in, say, 2019, but one made with a sense of triumph and relief unique to the COVID era in 2021.
Still, last August’s lessons weren’t lost on the Wolfpack. The hardship of preparing a team for a season without actually practicing as a team forced N.C. State to adapt and learn on the fly, and some of what became necessary under extreme conditions became tools the Wolfpack could use on a regular basis, whether that meant meeting and teaching virtually or working more closely with individual groups and players outside of a team setting.
“Last year obviously we had to go through different protocols and different things with COVID that kind of affected our overall learning,” Leary said. “We had to do a lot of things virtual. I think now this year being able to see everyone in person, being able to pick everyone’s brain, be able to communicate better with our offensive system is going to help us out so much more.”
N.C. State had to do that in 2020, with so many players in quarantine and unavailable to actually step on the practice field. It chose to do some of that in 2021.
“I think it did teach our staff that it doesn’t have to be training camp to get your team ready to play,” Doeren said. “You can do things differently. We can adjust. We can look at how things are done and apply. Maybe it’s not going to be a three-day-in-a-row normal scheme. You’re going to have a walk-through day, more of a teaching day on your feet. We had to do a lot of that last year, and I think it did help our guys situationally be better. I think we learned a lot, not just from a coaching standpoint but from a management-style standpoint.”
Last season was a crucible for the Wolfpack, a trial by virus, and with almost every starter back, including Leary and one of the ACC’s best linebacking corps, the lessons learned during that awkward year should never be far away.
So the question for the Wolfpack to start this season, with almost its whole team back, is simple: If N.C. State can put that kind of season together with almost no preparation, what can it do with a month of normalcy to prepare for South Florida -- and only South Florida?
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 5:20 AM.
