Wake Forest Looks to Keep Rolling Against Rival NC State
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Wake Forest has spent much of the first month of the season proving something about itself.
Against Miami, the Demon Deacons showed they could hang around with one of the best teams in the country. The following week at Louisville, they proved that performance wasn’t some one-off fluke by going on the road and knocking off the No. 16 Cardinals. Then came Stanford, which was supposed to present a different challenge altogether: Wake Forest was clearly the better team and simply needed to act like it.
A 57-3 victory probably qualifies.
NC State, Wake Forest’s next opponent, is — at least theoretically — considerably better than Stanford, and Carter-Finley Stadium is a much tougher environment than anything Wake Forest faced a week ago. It’s a rivalry game on the road against a team that somewhat has its back against the wall. The Wolfpack have enough talent to punish mistakes, especially if Wake Forest doesn’t bring the same edge it has shown against better competition.
NC State Players to Watch
The Wolfpack aren’t Miami. They aren’t even Louisville, although they did beat the Cardinals 31-28 last weekend. NC State is 3-2, averaging 36.8 points and 460 yards per game, all stats that indicate that this is a healthy operation capable of beating just about anybody. Included in that, however, is a 34-8 loss to Virginia and perhaps the strangest defeat anywhere in college football this season against Vanderbilt.
Wake Forest fans probably remember the latter.
NC State was six seconds away from winning when quarterback CJ Bailey inexplicably forgot how to play football. All he had to do was take a safety and end the game. Instead, Bailey held onto the ball long enough for Vanderbilt to knock it loose and recover it for the winning touchdown. Five milliseconds of quarterback brain fog turned victory into one of the most insane losses imaginable.
Bailey remains the player Wake Forest has to worry about most. He has completed 65.3% of his passes for 1,266 yards and eight touchdowns through five games, and he just threw for a career-high 373 yards against Louisville. JoJo Trader caught five passes for 92 yards in that game, while Keenan Jackson has scored five touchdowns over NC State’s last three contests.
Defensively, linebacker Popo Aguirre might be the biggest name to know. He entered the Louisville game third in the ACC in tackles per game, then proceeded to recover three fumbles against the Cardinals. Talk about a good day at the office.
A Rivalry With Something Behind It
The stakes extend beyond Wake Forest trying to move to 5-1.
Wake Forest-NC State dates back to 1910 and is the second-longest continuously played rivalry in the FBS. The Wolfpack won 34-24 in Winston-Salem last season, while Wake Forest’s most recent trip to Raleigh ended with a 34-30 Demon Deacons victory in 2024.
Rivalry games always carry a little something extra, and Carter-Finley should provide a much different environment than Wake Forest has experienced so far this season.
Still, the expectation should be clear.
Through five games, the Demon Deacons have been the more consistent team. They have handled Miami, Louisville, and Stanford about as well as anyone could reasonably have expected, and if the first month has taught us anything, the stiffer the test becomes, the better Wake Forest seems to play.
NC State is good enough to punish a poor performance. Wake Forest has simply given us more reasons to believe it won’t have one.
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Seth Dowdle is a 2024 graduate of TCU, where he earned a degree in sports broadcasting with a minor in journalism. He currently hosts a TCU-focused show on the Bleav Network and has been active in sports media since 2019, beginning with high school sports coverage in the DFW area. Seth is also the owner and editor of SethStack, his personal hub for in-depth takes on everything from college football to hockey. His past experience includes working in the broadcast department for the Cleburne Railroaders and at 88.7 KTCU, TCU's radio station.
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