Dave Doeren: 'We’re Excited To Play A Very Good Football Team"

NC State football head coach Dave Doeren is preparing to lead his team into Starkville, Mississippi this week as the Wolfpack looks to win a road game against Mississippi State.

Doeren spoke to the media Thursday afternoon, here’s a full breakdown of everything he had to say: 

What is the road trip experience like?

We have our walkthrough, kind of just to work backwards, we want to be at our hotel somewhere around dinner time. So, we’ll go backwards from there. You’ve got your flight to Mississippi State. Before the flight we have some walkthroughs, some treatments and some meetings. That’s about it. It just depends on how far you are going and whether you are bussing or flying. But our Fridays are pretty standard whether we are at home or away, the difference is a bus ride to the hotel versus a bus ride to the airport and a flight. 

And how is game day?

Well, night games are different than early games. You’ve got a lot of time to kill. You have a lot of meals, a lot of walkthroughs, pregame meetings, a highlight video we show to the guys. If it’s a night game there will be some dead time in the middle. Guys will watch college football a little bit. 

Can you lean on guys like Ruffin McNeill and Brian Mitchell, who have coached under Mike Leach, this week?

It doesn’t help as much as you guys talk about, to be honest. I mean, he’s gonna call the plays, and we’ve got to stop the plays. Everybody knows what they do, it’s just can you stop it? It’s not like he’s created this offense that no one has ever seen before. The Air Raid has been around for 20 years. There’s things you can ask, but at the end of the day it’s still breaking down what they do and teaching it to your guys to be good enough to stop it. 

Did you notice in the games you watched over the weekend if the crowd noise had any impact on those games?

I didn’t pay much attention to that. I was reading a story, maybe it was the Virginia Tech crowd was super loud. It sounded like it gave Carolina some problems with their crowd noise. Other than that, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. 

Mississippi State seemed susceptible to the big play. Does that change what you guys try to do on offense going into this week?

You study where things have happened. We’re always watching explosive-play reel to see if there are recurring themes in what defenses give up. Whether it’s a certain player that gives up a lot of big plays or a scheme where they are weak at certain points and don’t have an answer for it. Or is it the run game or the pass game, bootlegs, screens, whatever it is. We do that for every opponent. 

In the opener they struggled with tempo, they struggled with some things. But I think we’re gonna see a much better team than we saw in that first game. I think the crowd is going to be really into it, with it being a night game. I think the way we played will probably get their team a little bit more fired up about playing us than who they started the season with. I expect to see a very energetic and improved team than they were. If you watch the fourth quarter, they were a heck of a football team last week. We’ll see. 

They say you make the biggest jump between game week one and game week two. How big of a jump are you expecting from your guys this week?

I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve heard that every year. I don’t know. I think there’s some games where you don’t play very well and there’s a ton of things you can get better at. I also think that the level of competition comes into play. We’re going to play a much better team this week than we did last week. It may be better in a few things, but it may not look like it. We’ve got to go out there and do the best that we can. Every player, every position, every phase can be 1 percent than we were the week before. That’s kind of how we talk about improving, it’s just one little thing for every player. If 22 players do one thing better than a week ago, that’s 22 percent. That would be a lot of improvement on our field. It’s kind of how we look at it. It’s just one little thing each. Doing that over the course of 12 weeks and a bye week and then hopefully a postseason, then you are a heck of a lot better football team throughout the year. 

ACC-SEC talk aside, when players recognize a step up in competition, does the focus ramp up as well? 

They know we’re playing a good team, and they’re excited about where we’re playing. A lot has been said about game day there, the noise, the fanfare, everything. That’s why the guys play. They want to be in games like that. We’re excited to play a very good football team from a very good conference. 

How have you seen COVID change college sports forever or for the foreseeable future? 

I don’t think I can say it’s changed it forever, because I don’t know what that even means. But it made last year really hard. As far as this year, I think as coaches we’ve learned the value of your depth chart, learned how fast you can lose regularity and routine. I see a lot of high school teams right now are really struggling here in the state. There were a bunch of games cancelled again today for junior varsity teams. So the pandemic has changed our world. Is it a forever thing? I sure hope not. It seems like we’re in a much better place this year than we were last year. 

Does it make you more likely to get that second or third-team player a couple more reps in the week for the possibility that they may be thrown into action? 

Last year, we did that. We had to do that. We cross-trained players. We had guys playing multiple positions. Right now, we’re almost 100% vaccinated. We haven’t had any issues here with our team. It’s nothing like it was last year. Even our student body, you’re not hearing the same type of stuff that we heard a year ago. So I think there’s been a lot more people understanding how to handle it, maybe more people have had it and they’re more protective. I think a lot more people obviously are in the vaccine area, taking care of that, to keep themselves safe. 

You talked about Drake Thomas’ play in the opener. Did you see that coming from him out of fall camp, and also he’s entering year three in the program. Is there generally a time frame for when you see a player break out during their career? 

He definitely had a fall camp that would lead us to think that he was going to have that type of game, and to be honest that type of season. He was having a good year last year, he battled a lot of injuries throughout the year and played with pain. He’s put himself in a great place. The second part of your question, I think the second year a guy is a starter, which is where he is now, is where you really see them take off. That first year, there’s a lot of firsts. There’s a lot of things going on that are hard for them, nervous moments, first-time things, mood swings of a game. I think they learn a lot after that first year, and usually the second year you see a guy in that role, they start to emerge as a really good player for you.