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A baseball team is “strong up the middle” when its catcher, second baseman, shortstop, and center fielder are all formidable. The catcher’s pitch selection is connected to scouting reports on hitters and an awareness of where defensive players are positioned on the field. The second baseman and shortstop have to work together on double-play turns with a level of coordination not belonging to the third or first baseman. The center fielder is the traffic cop in the outfield, the person responsible for covering the most territory and calling the left or right fielder off the ball when it’s a close call.
The “up the middle” players on a baseball team have more defensive responsibility and perform the especially delicate tasks which enable a team to function smoothly. These are “nerve center” players who stitch together a larger unit.
There are many nerve centers on a football team, or more precisely, a larger football organization’s roster of players and coaches. Middle linebacker, free safety, and center are all basic examples of nerve centers. Yet, three other nerve centers stand above them: the two coordinators and the quarterback.
Coaching is such a detail-oriented profession, and quarterback is such a central position in college football these days, far more than it was in the early 1980s, when the running back was the bellcow position on college offenses. Teams generally won’t succeed if they don’t have competent coordinators and quarterbacks. (The head coach on one side of the ball could cover for a mediocre or weak coordinator, but not both coordinators.)
In 2019, North Carolina State has familiar people on its coaching staff, but people who have been promoted to new positions.
Des Kitchings and George McDonald were position coaches on last year’s offensive staff. After Eli Drinkwitz took the open head coaching job at Appalachian State, Dave Doeren needed to find a new coordinator. He promoted Kitchings and McDonald and made them co-coordinators. Kitchings and McDonald are being elevated to the coordinator position in the same season when North Carolina State is starting over at quarterback. Boise State transfer Ryan Finley capably led the offense the last few seasons. Now the Wolfpack need a new field general. Kitchings and McDonald will be able to prove their worth by cultivating an offense whose most important position is marked by uncertainty.
On defense, Doeren still has staff veteran Dave Huxtable as a co-defensive coordinator, but Ted Roof — part of last year’s coordinator team in Raleigh — left for Appalachian State to be Drinkwitz’s defensive coordinator. Tony Gibson, who worked on Dana Holgorsen’s staff at West Virginia before Holgo moved to Houston, will join Huxtable as a co-coordinator this year.
North Carolina State had some of its more productive seasons in recent years. Doeren didn’t reach the promised land of a New Year’s Six bowl bid — some highly annoying losses kept the Wolfpack from attaining their goal — but State certainly raised its floor after a series of dreary seasons which had Doeren on the hot seat.
Now comes the test of sustaining the level of performance the Wolfpack established in 2017 and 2018. It is a big ask to expect NCSU to improve upon the 2018 standard. Merely maintaining it or coming very close would probably rate as a satisfactory 2019 result. In order to do that, the Wolfpack’s nerve centers have to…
hold their nerve…
and show that they can perform as well as their predecessors.
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