2010 NC State Wolfpack Football: NC State @ Georgia Tech

Get out your calculators, folks. You could very well be in for a wild afternoon in Atlanta this Saturday.

When the North Carolina State Wolfpack take on the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, it's hard to see how this contest won't produce a minimum of 60 points. If one team fails to score 30, it's quite likely that the other team will make up the difference.

NC State might be the only undefeated team in this matchup, but the Pack definitely has its fair share of issues, which have been camouflaged by the team's schedule so far. It's true that when NCSU's schedule was first made, the slate looked a lot more difficult than it has turned out to be. Central Florida won Conference USA in 2007, but has fallen on hard times since. Wolfpack quarterback Russell Wilson completed only 10-of-30 passes against Central Florida, but the Golden Knights weren't good enough to take advantage of that fact. UCF just doesn't have the heft or quality to outplay a middle-tier ACC team, the kind of ballclub NC State appears to be at this point in time.

The team that figured to give Coach Tom O'Brien's club even more trouble - at least when the 2010 slate became known - was the Cincinnati Bearcats. The two-time defending Big East champions brought back Zach Collaros, the backup quarterback who ably filled in for sometimes-injured starter Tony Pike last season, as Cincy defended the conference title it originally won in the 2008 season. The Bearcats did lose prime receiver Mardy Gilyard, but they still brought back several key components from their championship outfit. Even though Coach Brian Kelly left for Notre Dame, the Cats were viewed at the beginning of the 2010 season as a team to take seriously. Well, after they played 60 minutes of football in Raleigh, North Carolina, no one took the Bearcats seriously anymore. Yes, NC State played a decent-enough game, building a 30-7 lead before surrendering two touchdowns and settling for a 30-19 win. However, there were at least 10 total fumbles in the game; only a small percentage of them were lost. NCSU was extremely sloppy for much of the first two and a half quarters. The Wolfpack were measurably better than Cincinnati was, but if the ball didn't bounce their way, the game could have been close against the new-look Bearcats, a team that wishes it didn't have a new look in comparison to the 2008 and 2009 world-beaters who strapped on the pads for UC.

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North Carolina State is therefore a team that's hard to read. Have the Pack's three wins represented a measure of their excellence more than anything else? The stats suggest otherwise. Wilson's terrible outing against Central Florida - combined with the parade of fumbles against Cincy - reflect a team that's gotten by because its opponents have been much worse. NC State isn't horrible, but its 3-0 record doesn't seem likely to hold up as 2010 moves along.

Georgia Tech is in a similar position. It's hard to know what to think about the Jackets after three games as well.

First of all, Tech lost to a Kansas team that looked absolutely dreadful on Sept. 17 in a decisive loss at Southern Mississippi. Georgia Tech players and coaches who watched Kansas get drilled by a Conference USA opponent must have gnashed their teeth and spat out curses to a considerable degree.

The good news for Tech is that it did rebound in week three to top North Carolina on the road. The limiting element of that 30-24 victory is that it came against a Tar Heel team still hampered by 12 suspensions stemming from the agent-based and tutoring-related scandals that have ravaged the UNC program in recent months. If UNC had been at full strength, the Tar Heels might have had enough manpower to turn back Tech, whose defense hemorrhaged for two and a half quarters before capitalizing on UNC turnovers.

Just who are these teams? We'll have to find out more on Saturday, but with NC State benefiting from stacks of opponents' errors and Georgia Tech sporting one of the worst defenses in America, expect the points to accumulate very quickly.

NC State Wolfpack @ Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets Football Preview