Speed?
Among my various other complaints about the offense—it not being good at anything, things of that nature—I have been annoyed by its consistently sluggish pace. For a team that has struggled for years to generate explosive plays, you’d think pressing the advantage after a chunk gain here and there might be useful, but neither Tim Beck nor Robert Anae seemed to agree.
So I was encouraged to hear Kurt Roper say this at his press conference yesterday:
“You have to have the ability to control tempo. It’s easier to teach them to go fast and then slow them down rather than go slow than speed them up. We’ve got to ingrain on our guys how to go fast. If you want to go fast, you have to be able to get lined up quickly. If you get lined up quickly, you’ve got the chance to control tempo.
“You have several ways to control that tempo, whether it’s get back into an 11-man huddle, a sugar huddle, a tempo play, a one-word play as you see people doing. If you want to control tempo, the first thing you have to do is be able to go fast.”
This is not a commitment to anything, but at least we’re talking about playing with some added urgency. (Mmm … sugar huddles.) I’m not asking for NC State to move at breakneck speed all the time, it’d just be nice if the offense sometimes utilized what pace can give you—preventing the defense from substituting, making communicating more difficult, pressuring them after they’re wrongfooted by a play, etc.
In 2024, NC State ranked 129th in seconds per play, right down there with the service academies. Playing that slow just feels like wasting opportunities to me. I’m hopeful we’ll see this change in 2025.