Despite Challenges, Beck has Wolfpack Offense on Track

NC State's new offensive coordinator Tim Beck has been forced to overcome some difficult circumstances in installing his system, but he's happy with how the Wolfpack has progressed with a week to go before its season opener

The coronavirus pandemic has created challenges for everyone still preparing to play college football this season.

Those challenges have only been magnified at NC State, where a new offensive coordinator has been doing his best to install a new offense amid the stops and starts of a most unusual preseason.

"I don’t think the install in itself is difficult. I think the process of installing it has been difficult because you are on again, off again," said Tim Beck, who was hired by coach Dave Doeren in December after three seasons at Texas. "From Zoom meetings to walkthroughs to practice. It’s just been that. 

"I think our players and coaches have done a great job. I think the resiliency of our guys and our players, just coming in every day and taking it as ‘Okay, what do we have to do today? Oh, we’ve got a Zoom? Okay.’"

Zoom might be the name of the video conferencing technology the Wolfpack has been using for communication during the NCAA's coronavirus-mandated dead period that has prevented coaches such as Doeren and Beck from having face-to-face contact with their players.

But it's anything but a description of the speed with which State's new coordinator has been able to familiarize those players with his system.

The first delay came in March, when spring practice was abruptly halted after just five of 15 scheduled workouts.

Then after the team returned from a longer than usual summer, preseason camp was interrupted for a week by a COVID-19 outbreak just as the Wolfpack was starting to gain some continuity.

Despite the obstacles, Beck likes what he's seen from his offense a week out from its first game.

"We did have some setbacks obviously with the virus, but I feel like our players have been pretty resilient and so has the staff," he said. "We’ve continued to coach them online as best we could, always creating video for them to learn from. I think memory wise, there’s no issues. I don’t feel a lot of busted assignments.

"Guys that have been quarantined for one reason or another, there’s some rust with them obviously. You have to shake that rust off."

State is hardly alone in that respect. A number of other programs, including in-state ACC rivals North Carolina and Duke, also had to suspend their preseason preparations because of COVID-19 clusters.

The timing of the Wolfpack's temporary shutdown might have been an issue had the team's season opener against Virginia Tech -- originally scheduled for Saturday -- hadn't been pushed back two weeks to Sept. 26.

According to Beck, State is well on the way to making up for lost time.

"Getting everybody back is good. You can see the transition," he said. "It’s all coming back. It’s like riding a bike. It’s starting to come back to some of these guys and you can see that transition in the last couple of days."

Beck is especially happy with the way his quarterbacks have handled the adversity and grasped his offense.

"With Devin (Leary) and really Bailey (Hockman) and Ben (Finley), the whole playbook is at their disposal right now," Beck said. "We’ve been able to get in everything that we need to get in. 

"As we work through our offense and we go through our practices, we find out that there’s some things that they can handle and some things that they can’t handle. It’s my job to figure out what those are. If it’s a necessity it’s ‘how do we fix that?’ If we don’t, then we just throw it out. That’s the beauty of being multiple."

Despite all the challenges, Beck is convinced that his team will be polished and ready once it finally gets to line up and play a game.

"They’ve held each other accountable," he said of his players. "They want to win. They want to work. They work really hard. Our players want to win, so they are doing all of the right things to be able to do that. 

"It’s just having the opportunity now to go out and play and actually do it. That right now is what all of the coaches are excited about, to have the opportunity to get to play somebody new and see how our guys do."

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