NC State head coach Dave Doeren met with the media to discuss the 31-28 loss at Stanford.
NOTE: Click the video above to watch the full press conference!
On the biggest takeaway from the game...
A lot of takeaways. It starts with me.
The guys didn’t play well enough, which means I didn’t have them ready.
I was really disappointed in our defense.
I thought we stopped the run well. We didn’t defend the pass. No. 0 had a day. He’s a good player, but we could have done a lot better covering him.
We made some good adjustments and played better for a while.
In the second half, they out-physicaled us on that side of the football.
You can't win games if you can’t win one-on-ones. That was very disappointing.
On the flip side, offensively, we knew we'd struggle at times.
We had three backup offensive linemen, and then it became four after Daniel Cruz went down.
That’s tough.
CJ battled. He used his legs and helped us.
I was proud of the guys for getting that touchdown at the end and giving us a chance to onside it.
But it wasn’t good enough.
Not even close.
How frustrating is that, especially coming off a bye week when you had extra time to prepare?
Very, very frustrating.
On defense, especially because we were healthy on that side of the football.
There was no excuse for it.
Was there anything schematically that Stanford did differently than what you saw on film?
No.
They just blocked us.
They gave their quarterback time.
We knew they'd run max protection. That’s something they’ve done against everybody.
But on the dropback stuff, we didn’t win enough.
No. 0 got open a lot in the first half.
He was targeted 12 times and caught 9.
Some of it was zone. Some of it was man.
We doubled him at times and took him away.
We put Brian Nelson II on him when we did that in the second half.
But they executed better than we did.
Were you surprised by the way they jumped out to a 14-0 lead?
I felt great about the preparation.
The guys practiced well, but we obviously didn’t play the way we expected.
What I liked was how we responded and got it back to 14-14.
The most disappointing part for me was their 90-yard drive in two minutes to close the first half.
We were getting the ball first in the third quarter.
You’d like to think we could hold somebody there when they have 90 yards to go.
I know this is fresh, but with five games remaining, do you adjust the goals at all, or do you take it day by day?
We’ve got five weeks left.
We adjusted our goals coming out of the bye.
We had six left, and the goal was to try to win them all, one at a time.
Now we move on to the next one.
Take it one game at a time, one day at a time, and keep trying to get better and find a way to win.
You mentioned the issues defending the pass. What specifically went wrong in coverage?
It was a lot of things.
In man-to-man, they won at times.
In zone, our linebackers didn’t get deep early in the game.
There was too much separation between the back end and the underneath coverage.
Then there was the pass rush.
We weren’t winning enough one-on-ones.
Was the lack of pressure an execution issue with the play calls?
It’s not execution.
It’s that guy blocking you.
It’s fundamentals.
At some point, you’ve got to win one-on-one.
I always tell a defensive lineman that a good defensive lineman should win more than 50% of his one-on-ones.
We’re not doing that right now.
Double teams, max protections, chipping, all of that I understand.
But in a true one-on-one, you have to win more of those than you lose.
It looked like Stanford was sending the interior receivers vertically and then working underneath with the outside receivers. Did that give you trouble?
They gashed us wherever they wanted to.
Second-and-12, and we told the guys, “It’s a screen.”
They ran a screen, and they still got 20 yards.
There’s no excuse for that.
We had a guy right there to stop it, and he missed the tackle.
We told them what play was coming in the helmet. We knew.
We still didn’t stop it.
What’s the next step for the team after this loss?
We go back and try to get these guys as healthy as we can.
We start tomorrow.
We’ll land on Saturday, put this one to bed, and move on to the next game.
That’s all you can do.
Go fight and try to win the next one.
