TheWolfpacker.com - Harvey's viewpoints

October 30, 2009

Terry Harvey
TheWolfpacker.com Columnist

Terry Harvey was a two-sport standout for NC State from 1991-95. The quarterback completed 442 of 785 passes for 5,925 yards and 38 touchdowns, all totals ranking third all-time in NC State history. He also pitched for the baseball team, tossing a pair of no hitters in his career. He spent three years in the minors for the Cleveland Indians and Tampa Bay Rays organizations, reaching Double A before retiring after shoulder surgery.

Harvey now lives in Raleigh with his wife and three sons. Here are Terry's thoughts after week six of NC State's season.

In your opinion how long have we been rebuilding and how much longer will we be rebuilding? Do you have confidence in our Coaches plan to rebuild our program and in his staffs ability to execute that plan? We have already changed our Coach, our staff, our players, our stadium, and our facilities without achieving success in the ACC. The only thing left unchanged is our fans. Is it time to change us too?

After the last game a lot of the callers onto the radio show were asking questions about the staff up to this point. You hear some people say we need to make some changes on the coaching staff. My view is that it is way too premature to be talking about changes.

Are we still building? Certainly, even Coach O'Brien would admit to that, but I think we are in a building stage, not rebuilding. That would be getting rid of the staff, starting someone new in here and setting us back another five years. In many cases it takes that long to see the fruits of your labor. There have been very few cases where a coach comes in and has an immediate impact.

The only places you are going to see that is in a weak conference or you take one of the premier historic programs such as Alabama where a guy like Nick Saban takes over a talented program and injects his own talent in there. Urban Meyer inherited talent at Florida. Southern Cal is probably another program that could do that, maybe even Notre Dame. Other than that, it's a long process to build a program. I think we need to get away from talking about coaching changes at the assistant coaching level. They are seasoned coaches, and they have been around long enough to make adjustments mid-season.

We do need to start seeing some of those adjustments from game-to-game and half-to-half. Sometimes you do need to mix it up and not be stubborn in your processes and your methods. Coaching obviously revolves around your personnel and what is your best way to use them to have a chance to win on Saturday.

It'll be interesting to see if we made some adjustments. We have not done much on defense before the bye. Offensively, we seem to be moving the ball pretty well, but if you look at the last couple of games we have little productivity in the second half, just one touchdown at Boston College.

If you were a head coach who would you want your coordinators be?

You probably have to look around the country to what type of team has a similar talent pool. I think the offensive coordinator at Miami has done a great job with a Russell Wilson type quarterback. They have been very successful offensively up to this point.

Really though, it's the luck of the draw with getting the right quarterbacks at the right time, i.e. Philip Rivers here at NC State.

What's the main problem with the Pack or the first thing you would address and what can they do to fix it?

When you see the last couple of games unfold the way they did there has to be some disconnect between coach and players. I'm sure they are working on that. It could be minimal or something more than we know about. We are not privy to what goes on behind the doors, but there is some disconnect to give up 50 points to Duke and Boston College. Against BC, when a game gets out of reach, you still have to play, and we didn't see a ton of that against them.

Offensively, I don't think there are significant issues. We have run the ball pretty good for the most part this season, and we have been productive throwing the ball, too. Outside the second half of the Duke and Boston College games, the offense has done enough to get the team an opportunity to win football games with the exception of South Carolina. They obviously failed to get the ball in the end zone against Boston College, which I thought was huge because that was an opportunity to get some momentum going into halftime.

Defense is the real issue right now. Not taking away from Boston College and Duke, but you cannot give up over 100 points to those two teams. I am a novice on defense, but I have not seen a ton of aggressiveness from the defense. I think that is the first thing you got to adjust. Is it scheme or personnel on defense? There was only one personnel change from the Boston College to Florida State game, and that was because of injury. That tells me that it might not be a personnel change. Then it goes back to scheme. If it's not that, then maybe we just don't have the talent.

My opinion is that we have seen the same ebb and flow for several weeks now and giving up the points and yards by the boatload. If you are not changing personnel, then maybe you need to make some changes with schemes. My humble opinion is you got to dictate to the offense and alter the flow of the game. I think you need to move late and mix up your looks. If you give me a vanilla look unchanged when I snap it, that makes the quarterback's job easy. You want to make the quarterback think because that slows down his reaction time. I'd like to see it be more aggressive and roll the dice.

If you are young and inexperienced on defense, the best thing you can do for him is throw him into the fire. That may mean telling a corner he's on an island and the receiver is all his. In zone defenses, people are relying others to help them. You can eliminate a lot of that gray area when you tell a corner he's got one guy. We may not have the personnel to do it every play, but I wouldn't mind mixing it up. The zone defense has not been disruptive the last few games. I think the fans would like to see it.

Worst case scenario is it doesn't work, but it shows everyone you are willing to mix it up. I think we have been playing defense defensively, and we need to be playing with reckless abandonment and get after somebody.

If you were the head coach, would you replace Archer after the season?

I think that's way too premature to be thinking about change. This staff has a very good track record after the bye week here. Let's wait and see how this thing turns out. It could be a moot point if they get it changed. Let's judge them by the entire body of work at the end of the year like any employers would do with their employees.

Do you think that the quality of the officiating has changed much over the years?

I don't know. The game is much faster now, but I do not that NC State should not look for officiating as the culprit as to wins or losses. That's what another school of very close proximity to NC State does. You just try to control what you can control, and I never worry about officiating.

Terry, did you work on making any improvements over your bye week?
Did you work on your fundamentals, or a complete overhaul of your strategy?
(Don't bother answering. I'm just funnin'. Welcome back.)

It's kind of funny. I did predict on the radio what I think Coach O'Brien has done during the bye week. I've been on those off weeks before where things are not going well. You go back to butting heads and hitting and tackling, showing some aggression. It's almost like you need to earn your position again. The thing I mentioned was fundamentals. You work on them until you are blue in the face, and the No. 1 think O'Brien said they worked on was fundamentals, mainly tackling and alignment.

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