12/1/2019 football Edit

What they're saying about NC State's loss to UNC

Matt Carter • TheWolfpackCentral

Editor

Here are the various headlines and tweets for Sunday, Dec. 1.

What They're Saying

• Matt Carter, TheWolfpacker.com — Column: An offseason with a lot of questions looms for NC State

For a fleeting moment, there was some hope. NC State football led 10-6 at halftime over archrival North Carolina, exerting physicality at the line of scrimmage to take the advantage.

But like the rest of the year beforehand, and eerily similar to what happened in the loss to Louisville, NC State melted down in the third quarter with three turnovers and allowing four touchdowns.

The Heels were allowed to savor a blowout, 41-10 win over its rival. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the Wolfpack who have enjoyed superiority over Chapel Hill in recent years on the gridiron and now face an uncertain future in that rivalry.

What may be more painful is that the time has arrived to face the hard questions that come after a 4-8 season and league-worst 1-7 mark in the ACC.

• Luke DeCock, Raleigh News and Observer — Gap between resurgent UNC and rebuilding NC State as big as Saturday’s final score

Both of those, like all the others, were by a single possession, underlining how narrow the margins have been for North Carolina, how close this was to a truly magnificent season. That said, the Tar Heels will absolutely take it: at the least, the season-opening win over South Carolina, ending a long streak of failure in that particular scenario, not to mention the rivalry wins over Duke and N.C. State. If the record wasn’t what Brown hoped for in his second first season at North Carolina, everything else has been.

There’s none of that optimism at N.C. State, where the Wolfpack dropped its sixth straight to close out a difficult, injury-plagued season at 4-8. Even if fully healthy, it’s hard to see any obvious areas of automatic improvement next season, especially given the quarterback situation, and Dave Doeren already reshuffled his staff after last season, always the hole card of a coach with few other options.

N.C. State has certainly had its moments in this rivalry under Doeren, but with the inroads North Carolina has made on the recruiting trail under Brown and the Wolfpack in a rebuilding process of indeterminate length, the gap between the programs at the moment appears to be as big as Saturday’s final score.

• Ed Hardin, Greensboro News and Record — UNC demolishes State in a game that felt like the start of something

Mack Brown didn’t see his shadow tonight, which means there’s four more weeks of UNC football.

Carolina's 41-10 victory in the rain, at the end of a long and listless year of football around Raleigh, ended a losing streak to its rival and ensured a reservation for a holiday bowl in some sunny clime.

Or maybe Shreveport.

For the Wolfpack, home for Christmas actually sounds good.

Maybe in a year or so, we’ll look back to this season as the start of something. Maybe this was the beginning of a legitimate run back to legitimacy for Brown and the Tar Heels. Or maybe it was just another bland football season in a bland football state.

• David Kehrli, Burlington Times News — Wolfpack implodes in second half

Any hope of ruining a rival’s season turned to dust for North Carolina State with a self-induced implosion in the second half on Saturday night.

Seven Wolfpack drives in total, each ending with the Tar Heels getting the ball in some fashion. Four turnovers, twice giving up possession on downs and one three-and-out. An equation that equaled 35 unanswered points for visiting North Carolina as it put on a 41-10 whipping at Carter-Finley Stadium.

“Without a doubt, we fell apart there in the third quarter. Three (of four straight) drives with turnovers, offensively,” N.C State coach Dave Doeren said. “We did not stop them, obviously, defensively. The first half, a lot of good things happened. The second half, nothing good happened; we didn’t make anything good happen. We’ve got a lot to fix.”

For the first time since 2013, N.C. State won’t play in a bowl game, breaking a streak of five consecutive appearances which began in Doeren’s second season with the program.

• Jaylan Harrington, Technician — Déjà vu as NC State ends nightmare season with terrible third quarter

Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the idea of eternal recurrence, that given enough time, events will occur again and again. NC State’s performance against UNC was proof positive of the theory — as well as a good reason to embrace Nietzsche’s nihilism — with NC State once again losing a game after being blown out in the third quarter.

“It kind of felt just like the Louisville game, going up in the first [half] and the second half just losing it,” said graduate defensive tackle Larrell Murchison.

The Wolfpack continued the story of its entire season Saturday as its offense returned to form thirty minutes into the game. After taking care of the ball in the first half, the unit turned the ball over on three of its five third-quarter possessions, and UNC capitalized each and every time the Wolfpack did. The Tar Heels were forced to punt on their first drive of the second half. Drives two through six? All touchdowns.

“We did absolutely everything possible to lose that game in the third quarter,” said head coach Dave Doeren. “It started with the penalties in the first drive that we got the football, and it went downhill from there.”