CLEMSON, S.C. — It was the avoidability of it all that seemed to rankle Devin Leary the most, not merely a missed opportunity but one N.C. State never really fully grasped. It wasn’t just that the Wolfpack couldn’t seem to get out of its own way at times. It was that the flaws N.C. State couldn’t overcome could be seen so far in the distance. Months even.
There was anger in the Wolfpack quarterback’s words, and it seemed to emanate from the closed doors of the locker room behind him as well.
“A little bit heartbroken, a little bit pissed off,” Leary said. “We walked off that field knowing we didn’t play to the best of our ability. We had very high aspirations. We had very high expectations coming into this game and we thought we prepared well, but we didn’t execute well.”
All the hopes and dreams — the very high aspirations — N.C. State brought into this season were long gone by then, washed away like so many others before on this field, not only at the hands of merciless Clemson but the Wolfpack’s own — the first and most crucial turnover of the 30-20 loss Saturday night bounced off the hands of an N.C. State receiver.
In the end, for all the N.C. State players who decided to come back to play in this game, under these lights, for these stakes, it was the two who didn’t who N.C. State missed the most: Emeka Emezie and Ickey Ekwonu, the big-play receiver and left tackle the Wolfpack sorely needed Saturday night.
Which is the normal order of things in college football: players move on, and must be replaced. It’s the cycle of life. N.C. State has known for nine months those holes had to be filled. It wasn’t for lack of trying. But in this moment of truth, a season of promise hanging in the balance, the inability to protect Leary’s blind side and the absence of a dependable receiver beyond Thayer Thomas left the Wolfpack offense unable to keep up with Clemson.
The same offensive inefficiencies that nearly sunk the Wolfpack against East Carolina and were only camouflaged against inferior opposition cropped up at the worst possible moments, a weakness the Wolfpack couldn’t overcome against a Clemson team that’s nowhere near as intimidating as its high-powered predecessors.
Leary threw one interception and it wasn’t an errant throw; it went through the hands of Christopher Toudle and straight to a Clemson defender. Leary took a few deep shots for Devin Carter but could only connect on one, in the first quarter. Thomas remains as steady as ever, but the rest of the Wolfpack receivers are a perpetual roll of the dice that too often came up snake eyes Saturday.
As for the offensive line, it was no match for Clemson, especially on Leary’s left. Anthony Belton started the game at left tackle, as he has all season, but after getting victimized for a pair of brutal blind-side sacks, Bryson Speas took over in the second half. On one, Leary was in mid-throwing motion as he was slammed from behind, somehow maintaining his grip on the ball against all probability.
These are the fine margins by which games are won and lost in the rarefied football air of the top 10, the kind of mistakes and deficits Clemson finds ways to erase, year after year, to stay on top. It wouldn’t have taken much for N.C. State to take this game to the wire, but the Wolfpack didn’t have it.
“This was a good football game with a good team on the field,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said. “We didn’t play our best. I think we’re a really good football team but they were better than us tonight. That’s where we’re at.”
There’s no shame in losing at Clemson, nor should the Wolfpack be denigrated for doing so. The No. 1 team in the country might be expected to come in here and win, but not the 10th-ranked team. This wasn’t 2018, when the Wolfpack arrived undefeated and left utterly defeated, outplayed from the first snap. N.C. State was neither overrated nor completely overmatched. In Raleigh, the roles might have been reversed. But not here.
And now a recalibration is in order. The College Football Playoff is almost certainly out. Clemson gets a mulligan. No one else in the ACC does. And while N.C. State can get help from elsewhere to get back into the Atlantic Division fight, Clemson already holds the tiebreakers over State and Wake Forest. That’s a tough bar for anyone else to clear. A home loss to Florida State next week and N.C. State can start thinking about spending Christmas in El Paso.
There was an opportunity here, a small enough gap between these teams to overcome, that doesn’t come along often. If N.C. State truly was the team it thought it was, truly had fate and destiny on its side, it would have found a way. Instead, the same flaws it knew it had all along proved predictably fatal, and now all of those lofty ambitions the Wolfpack has been harboring will have to be put aside.
