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NC State Football

DOEREN: "We Just Need To Go Play Football Now"

September 17, 2020
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NC State head coach Dave Doeren met with the media via Zoom Thursday afternoon for the final media availability before the Wolfpack’s season opener versus Wake Forest.


Are you behind the effort to allow parents into stadiums?

“Absolutely. I understand there are rules and regulations, and you don’t want to open up Pandora’s box for everybody, but it seems like there should be a little flexibility when you see a lot of people hanging out on a patio at a bar but you can’t have 500 parents in a 60,000-seat stadium. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. These kids have been through a lot. Their parents, like all of us that have kids, have been watching them go through a lot, and for most of their lives, they’ve been able to watch them play in person. I think it would be a great thing for that to happen. We are allowed to use, at this time, 50 tickets that we can do for our parents. Obviously, I’d love to see all of them in there. Hopefully, that’ll happen for this game. If not, I know they said they were going to re-evaluate it after September.”

As of right now, how many players do you expect to have available on Saturday? How does that compare to the lowest number you’d had available during camp?

“We had 105 guys today, and that’s not all COVID related. Some guys are out with ankle sprains and things like that. That’s the highest we’ve been. When we started back after the eight-day break, we had 45 players at practice, and I think we gained about 10 players back per day after that. A week later, we were up to 84 after Sept. 1. We’re in a good place for the most part. The 105 that we’ll have that are available to play have been able to practice all week. Nobody got out of quarantine yesterday and is totally out of shape, and if they were, we wouldn’t put them out there. We feel good about the depth chart you guys have, and all of those guys have been at practice.”

How did you help Ricky Person, Jr. work through his injuries and his uncertainty on returning to football?

“We have four captains, and then each week I'll have a game captain for somebody who’s showing leadership on our team. Ricky will be our fifth captain for this game. He’s been through a lot physically. As an athlete, when you have things that prevent you from playing the sport you’ve been playing since five years old, it’s really hard on you mentally. It’s hard on the personality, confidence, and mental health. Ricky had a lot of those ups and downs due to things out of his control. What happens when you’re repetitively injured is you lose training time. You lose that eight weeks with [Dantonio] ‘Thunder’ [Burnette]. You lose 15 straight practices in the spring, and it’s hard to develop. That set him back, but to his credit, he came back in January and has done an outstanding job not only in our program in the winter time but keeping himself in shape over the quarantine period he had and putting together a really solid fall camp where he didn’t miss a single day. I’m happy for him and excited for what that will do for him personally and mentally. As a former athlete, when I hurt my Achilles, it’s hard. It’s really hard when you’re taken away from the field, away from your teammates, away from meetings. As far as helping him through it, I think it was a joint effort. There were a lot of people in this building who helped him from the coaching staff to the strength staff to his parents to our trainers to mental health… you name it. These players have a lot of people around them that are here for them and want to help them through those types of situations.”

What’s been the most challenging thing to manage throughout this time?

“I think the day-to-day change in schedule was the hardest thing for the players. They’re just used to routine during this time of year. For me, it was the contact tracing piece that was the hardest. You have one kid who was asymptomatic eat lunch, and three guys might have been around him when he ate, and they pass their COVID test and feel great, and they can’t come into the building for 14 days. That happened a lot over that period when students came back. As you guys know, there are symptoms that are the same symptoms for almost everything out there that we could have from a runny nose to a scratchy throat to a headache… you name it. My recollection is that I had a headache everyday as a player. That was hard. Our drills are based on our numbers. How many reps they take are based on our numbers. You never want to try to push these guys to a point where you’re having soft tissue injuries because you’re doing too much. That was really challenging for us as a staff, but it’s something we’ve embraced. We talked about ‘embracing the suck,’ and that’s really what it was at some times. The guys were good and just tried to find solutions and not be someone who sits around and is more negative in a negative situation.”

How do you feel about the situational reps over the last couple of weeks?

“We’ve spent a lot of time in the last 10 days in situational football. When we came out of that eight-day break and only had 45 players, we couldn’t do things like that. We really had to wait until we had enough players, which was about a week later. That was about 10 days ago, and every single day, we’ve had a two-minute drill, we’ve worked on third down, we’ve worked on red zone, and we’ve worked on game-ending situations. Are we where we want to be? I think we’ve done as much as we can. I think we just need to go play football now and kind of see where we’re at, how much it’s absorbed, and how they handle it under the lights.”

How confident do you feel in the stability of having players play their own position without having to switch around?

“We’ve cross-trained, as you know, in case we lose players. The depth chart you have is where we’re at, and we feel good about that depth chart. We just need to see the guys play now. We need to tackle, catch, hang onto the ball, and protect it. We feel confident. We have some guys on the depth chart that haven’t been back for two weeks. We don’t expect them to play the whole game. We’re going to have to rotate in those positions. I’m not going to put a young man out there and ask him to do something he’s not ready to do. We will use depth as our friend in some position groups. There are some players like Joe Sculthorpe, Grant Gibson, and Ricky Person who have played the entire camp and are in great shape. We’ll have rotation in those spots, for example, and we feel great about that, but in other spots, we’ll have to use depth.”

Have you addressed what it would mean to beat Wake Forest at home?

“We had a team meeting on Sunday and talked about the rivalry. As you know, it’s the third longest standing consecutively played rivalry in the country. Based on what happens here with some of those games out west that may not play, we may end up being the longest standing rivalry. It’s been played since 1910. There’s a lot of history in it. They've beaten us three years in a row. Prior to that, we beat them three years in a row. Both teams have had their opportunities, for the most part. They’ve been pretty close games though last year’s wasn’t. Our guys know what this game is about. It’s an in-state game. It’s an opportunity to play a team down the road that we have a lot of respect for. It’s a good program. Dave Clawson and his staff do a tremendous job, and we look forward to competing against them.”

You’ve used hand signals to communicate during overtly loud crowds. Will you keep using them with the empty crowd so Wake Forest doesn’t hear the calls and pick up on a pattern?

“Well, it’s not empty. We’ve got some sweet cutouts in there right now, and I’m proud to say my dog Murphy is one of them. It’s pretty awesome. We have hand signals because our guys have to be able to communicate assuming that we can’t hear each other. I know this is a unique year, but if we have to yell something to the far side of the field, even with no crowd noise, that corner may not hear it. We have to be able to hand signal. It’s the same thing from quarterback to wideout. It allows you to play faster from sideline to player as well."

 
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