What made Friday night in Raleigh worth caring about wasn't that NC State beat an FCS team by 73 points. Programs at that level are supposed to do that. It's who they beat, and how completely.
Richmond wasn't a body left on the schedule to pad a record. The Spiders came into Carter-Finley Stadium at 2-0, ranked in the AFCA FCS Coaches Poll, and rated a top-25 FCS team by SP+. Their defense, led by a preseason Patriot League Defensive Player of the Year at defensive end, had shut out both of its previous two opponents in the first half. Their offense had a quarterback throwing for a combined 460 yards and 6 touchdowns across those two games and a running back who'd already piled up 142 yards and 3 scores of his own. This was a defense that knew how to start fast, in a program that was genuinely trending up.
NC State ran Richmond off the field. Touchdowns on the first six possessions, a 49-0 lead by halftime, and a defense that held the Spiders to 110 total yards and six first downs for the entire game. NC State's offense found a groove, but the bigger story was a defense that looked like a different unit than the one that got run over the week before in Charlottesville.
That week before matters, because you can't talk about this result honestly without the context behind it. NC State opened its season with a 34-8 loss at Virginia in which quarterback CJ Bailey, who arrived this year with one of the bigger contracts and reputations at his position in the sport, had the worst game of his college career: 12 of 23 for 84 yards, no touchdowns, an interception, and a fumble in the red zone. The football world spent a week asking whether NC State's season, and Bailey's, was already cracked open. This was billed as a get-right game.
It did more than that. A 73-0 win over an overmatched cupcake would have counted as a get-right game. A 73-0 win over a ranked FCS defense that hadn't allowed a first-half point all season is something more, and NC State fans shouldn't feel sheepish calling it that, even against lower-division competition.
The individual story of the night belonged to running back Duke Scott, who was doing damage almost from the opening whistle. He broke off a long touchdown run on NC State's second possession and kept piling up yardage before most of the crowd had settled into their seats, finishing with well over 100 rushing yards and multiple touchdowns in the first half alone. Transfer back Davion Gause got in on it too, scoring on his very first carry in a Wolfpack uniform to open the game. By the time the weather delay hit in the second quarter, on a night the game had already been stopped nearly 90 minutes for lightning, the outcome wasn't in doubt. NC State finished with a school-record number of rushing touchdowns and the most total yards in Carter-Finley Stadium history.
I'd caution against turning this into a referendum on Bailey specifically. The recaps of this game barely mentioned his passing line, leaning instead on the ground game and the defense, and I don't have his exact numbers from Friday to point to. If anything, that's the more interesting subplot: NC State didn't need Bailey to be brilliant to bury a good team. It needed its offensive line and backfield to be brutal and its defense to be suffocating, and both of those things happened.
NC State moves to 1-1, Richmond falls to 2-1, and neither record means much right now. The real story from Raleigh isn't the 73 points; it's that a team that looked broken seven days earlier turned around and made a ranked FCS opponent look like it didn't belong on the same field. That's a real answer, even if the questions about Bailey and this offense against real competition are still open.
