NC State’s ‘grit’ appears after back-to-back one-possession wins to open ’25 campaign

By Noah Fleischman

A year ago, Dave Doeren sat in his padded office chair inside his Murphy Center fourth-floor office with high expectations surrounding his team. It didn’t mean much to the veteran coach. He knew his team needed to go out and prove the hype around the program was real. 

At the time, nearly every national outlet ranked NC State as a preseason top-25 team with some calling the Wolfpack a dark horse for the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. 

That, however, didn’t happen. 

The Pack, instead, went 6-7 with a Military Bowl loss to East Carolina in a turbulent season that featured several injuries, including a pair of concussions that ended graduate quarterback Grayson McCall’s playing career. While Doeren downplayed his team’s external expectations ahead of last season, calling it “preseason hoopla,” he had a new focus this past offseason: righting the ship in 2025 after four one-possession losses a year ago. 

“Losing is terrible, no one likes it, but when you know you were a play or two away multiple times, it really eats at you,” said Doeren, who sat in the same chair behind his wooden desk for this preseason interview with TheWolfpacker.com. “What could I have done to get one or two better plays out of this game? It’s not on just me, it’s everybody, but it starts with me.” 

After spending most of spring practice and fall camp on how to close games out, NC State has seen that training paid off. The Wolfpack, which was 2-4 in one-possession games last fall, has opened this fall with back-to-back one-score wins — the defense coming up with key stops at the end of its victories over East Carolina and Virginia.

First, senior cornerback Jamel Johnson made a game-saving tackle against ECU on 4th-and-1 from the NC State 11-yard line with 37 seconds remaining to earn the season-opening win. Fast forward nine days, and graduate outside linebacker Cian Slone’s posted his first career interception in the end zone with Virginia looking to retake the lead with 62 seconds left. 

All the work Doeren and his staff put in with the new-look roster over the offseason seemed to come through. The 13th-year coach said each of the four one-possession losses prior to the Military Bowl defeat “left a bad taste in your mouth.”

Not anymore.

“I think it’s a team that understands who NC State is,” Doeren said after the 35-31 win over Virginia on Saturday afternoon. “It’s grit. This team has grit. It’s in our DNA. We train in chaos. We look forward to tough situations here. We’ve practiced a lot of this stuff that you’re seeing at the end of games, and the guys always revert back to their training.”

What made NC State’s win over Virginia — a nonconference game, for those wondering — most impressive was the fact the Wolfpack played from behind, something it struggled to do a year ago. In all four one-possession losses last fall, NC State responded to first-half deficits with furious comeback attempts falling just short. But against Virginia, down 10 at the half, the Pack didn’t panic. Instead, it rallied in its secondary locker room under the west end zone bleachers. 

Sure enough, NC State emerged from the halftime break with a purpose. The Wolfpack scored the first 14 points of the third quarter, a period in which the team took control of the game with three scores while it allowed the Cavaliers to plunge into the end zone just once. 

The Wolfpack played just as it hoped. Its defense got critical stops, including the game-sealing interception from Slone, while the offense marched down the field and answered the Cavaliers’ scores. 

For sophomore quarterback CJ Bailey, the youngest captain of the Doeren era, the Wolfpack’s second-half performance was exactly what he was looking to see from his squad. 

“This was our first time being down as a team … We wanted to see how we were going to battle through adversity,” Bailey said. “We were ready to go back on the field and change the trajectory of the game. Our team wanted to fight. That’s the biggest thing. We were not laying down. There was another half to go, and our team just battled back in the second half. We got stops, we scored touchdowns — we did a lot of things that we could do to win.”

NC State’s resolve helped the team earn its 32nd home non-conference win since Doeren took over in 2013. It was a step in the right direction, considering NC State’s one-score losses a year ago stemmed from mental errors that ended up proving costly by the end of the game. 

The Wolfpack avoided those against the Cavaliers. And as Bailey said, the team didn’t quit after seeing a double-digit deficit at the half. NC State, instead, leaned on the program’s core values to emerge with the crucial momentum-building victory.

The blue-collar program earned a pair of blue-collar wins to start the new campaign 2-0.

“They’re tough kids. They want to win. They know how to dig deep, and we’ve trained them well in those situations,” Doeren said. “It’s a combination of things, along with the identity of our program: hard, tough, together. If you’re going to be on this football team, you have to have that kind of resiliency in you. I’m proud of the leadership guys on our team because they’re demanding that from each other as well.”