RALEIGH, N.C. – All three Triangle-area Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) football programs are ready to kick off the 2015 season beginning on Thursday.
The North Carolina Tar Heels will face the Southeastern Conference’s (SEC) South Carolina Gamecocks in the Belk College Kickoff at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C. at 6 p.m.
The Duke Blue Devils play later on Thursday (9:30 p.m.) when they take on the American Athletic Conference‘s (AAC) Tulane Green Wave in another nationally televised game from Yulman Stadium in New Orleans, La.
To round out the weekend, the N.C. State Wolfpack hosts the Sun Belt Conference‘s Troy Trojans at Carter-Finley Stadium on Saturday with a 6 p.m. kickoff.
Ready to go
During the league’s weekly coaches teleconference held Wednesday, head coaches Larry Fedora (UNC), David Cutcliffe (Duke), and Dave Doren (N.C. State) all noted that they looked forward to seeing how preseason preparation would address their team’s needs for the upcoming season.
“It’s a game we’ve known about all year, so our fans, our players, they’ve all looked forward to this,” Fedora said.
“Anticipation has been tremendous. There’s been a lot of talk about it. It’s been something that our kids have talked about through the off-season, summer, all of those things. In that aspect, being on national TV, being in an area that we recruit very heavily, I think it’s a great situation.”
“I’m excited to see what we look like,” Cutcliffe stated.
“All of us have these first-game jitters in college football. We haven’t seen ourselves against anyone else. I know our players are excited about this. We’re relatively healthy coming out of camp. We had a couple of tough losses, but we’re going to focus on who we’ve got ready to go and hopefully play at a very high level and travel well. This is a good experience for all of our younger players to be put on the road right off the bat.”
“Looking forward to playing our first game of the season,” Doeren said.
“It’s been a great fall camp for our players. At this point you’re 15 spring practices and 29 fall practices added up, and you’re around 43 to 44 practices without a game. The guys are ready to get on the field and the coaches are ready to see them play. Thankful to be at home and in a sold-out atmosphere, and appreciative to our fans for that. Looking forward to getting back in Carter-Finley. Had a great recruiting class a year ago. Some of those kids will play, and just having a chance to see them in their first college games, and some of the guys that redshirted that have been in the program a couple years have developed into guys that get their first college reps.”
Taking the snap
All three teams have adjusted depth at various positions, allowing for redshirt and true freshmen to make starts, while more experienced, depth reserves will also come to the fore and answer questions of whether they are ready to do so, or not.
For all three teams, it all begins with the starting quarterback – Marquise Williams for UNC, Thomas Sirk for Duke, and Jacoby Brissett for N.C. State.
“We’ll, he’s a guy that fit our scheme tremendously when we walked in, a plus for us,” Fedora said of Williams.
“Then watching him grow within the offense, there was never a doubt about his competitiveness, how fiery he was. Then he had to try to adapt to the things that we wanted him to do within the offense. He’s done a really tremendous job of that. Then the challenge for him this past off-season was to be more consistent in everything you do, the way you lead, the way you play, the way you are off the field, everything. So I think Marquise has accepted that challenge. I think he’s done a great job with it all the way up to this point.”
“Well, he’s going into his fourth year in our system,” Cutcliffe noted of Sirk.
“He had a setback young with the Achilles tear, but he is really, I consider, an experienced player. He’s played when the game is on the line and played a role for us a year ago, an important role. But he’s ready to play. He’s performed well not only this fall, but he had a tremendous spring. He’s an accurate passer. He’s got great vision. He’s a big guy. I think our team is very confident in Thomas. I think they’re certainly confident in our backup Parker Boehme, who’s performed well, but I think right now our team is at a very high level of confidence in what Thomas is doing, and rightfully so. He’s performed at a high level for us in all of our practices.”
“He’s in a great place right now mentally,” Doeren said of Brissett’s readiness.
“I think last year was his first year as a starter, so this time last year he was pretty nervous, and he just looks like a guy that’s played a lot of football, knows the system, very dependable and consistent and worked a lot in the off-season on his play action game and has done a really nice job in fall camp with those throws. Looking forward to his senior year. I think any time you have a returning starter as the senior quarterback, it’s exciting for your offense.”
Defensive changes
On the other side of the ball, many are curious to see how significant changes in coaching, with Gene Chizik having come in to lead the Tar Heels defense, while new personnel in the linebacker position for Blue Devils, with Xavier Carmichael and Dwaye Norman starting in the Mike and Will positions respectively, will play out for each team.
“You go back and you evaluate everything you do every season, every aspect of the program, from myself to what we do as a staff to every aspect that we have with our players, from the training on up all the way to the schemes,” Fedora said.
“We’ve made changes every single year. You look at what’s happened in the past and you say, ‘Okay, how do we make this better? How do we improve it? Do we need to cut it out? Do we need to adapt?’ All those things. Hopefully we’ve put the right formula together for this football team…Gene is changing the culture on that side of the ball with what we want to do offensively. He’s implementing his style, his philosophy on that side. I think it’s had a big impact on us because it’s made us different. We’re different than we were. Again, you have no way of knowing until we get out there and play a football game. But I’m excited about the opportunities that are coming.”
“Well, obviously when you’ve got two new starters at linebacker and a new starter at corner, you’re anxious to see how they’re going to play against other competition, and Tulane has got a great quarterback and a great receiving corps and tight ends,” Cutcliffe said.
“It’s a big-time match-up. It’s going to be a challenge, but it’s an opportunity for us to learn a lot about ourselves because Tulane is a good football team, much better than people think. So that’s probably the biggest area of concern.”