CJ Bailey threw 40 passes against Louisville on Saturday, completed 24 of them for a career-high 373 yards and found Keenan Jackson from 19 yards and Tyran Warren from 34, and he did it with Teague Andersen playing right tackle instead of center and Rico Jackson making his first career start at left tackle. Duke Scott carried five times for 12 yards, left in the first quarter with an apparent left leg injury and came back to the sideline in a boot. Davion Gause took the rest of it with 21 carries, 69 yards, 46 more through the air. NC State won 31-28, its first ACC game and first ACC win of 2026.
That one afternoon is Bailey's season in miniature. He has become the steady thing on this offense while almost nothing around him has held still.
What the Louisville win actually settled
Not as much as 31-28 suggests, and more than you might think.
Start with the defense, because it did something genuinely new. The Wolfpack forced three fumbles, Isaiah Shirley, AJ Prim and Harvey Dyson III, and recovered every one, with Popo Aguirre's three recoveries setting a program single-game record, on top of three sacks and five tackles for loss. A week earlier against App State this group managed one sack and three tackles for loss. Dave Doeren is in his 14th season with both coordinators back, so there is no scheme change to credit here; this was the same defense finally producing the pass rush the staff has been waiting on. The caveat is the 485 yards Louisville piled up in 22 minutes of possession. Louisville averaged 8.8 yards per play to NC State's 5.9 and still lost, which is a nice way of saying the Wolfpack won the turnovers and the clock rather than the line of scrimmage.
Then there is the backfield. Two weeks ago Scott answered the question everyone had about him, carrying 25 times for 148 yards and two touchdowns against App State including the go-ahead score. That was the heavy-volume, efficient game he needed. Four quarters of football later he was in a boot. Spike Sowells Jr. has now missed three straight games at center since leaving the Richmond game.
The record is 3-2, 1-1 in the league. That matters mostly because Bailey's whole case as NC State's quarterback is that he came back as the best career completion-percentage passer in school history, with 3,105 yards and 25 touchdowns a year ago, and that was supposed to translate into conference wins the program has not been getting. One is on the board. It took a 28-yard field goal and a sack on the last drive.
Wake Forest comes back to Carter-Finley
Saturday at noon ET on The CW, Wake Forest makes its first trip to Raleigh since October 2024. That was the game where Grayson McCall was carted off in the first quarter after being hit by three Wake Forest defenders, and where Bailey came off the bench and threw two touchdown passes in a 34-30 loss. Less than three weeks later McCall retired, saying the specialists and his family had concluded this was a concussion he could not come back from.
Nobody needs to make that into a revenge story. But the quarterback who walked onto that field in an emergency two years ago walks back into the same building as the unquestioned starter coming off the best passing day of his life, and Wolfpack fans who were there will feel it when he takes the first snap.
The model gives NC State a 40.7% chance in this one, and the reason is the gap in health. Wake Forest arrives 4-1 off a 57-3 rout of Stanford with Gio Lopez finally past the hip problem that limited him through September. NC State is winning with turnovers and possession while its two most important non-quarterback pieces up front and in the backfield are unavailable or unknown.
So watch the first series, specifically the interior. If Sowells is back, this offense gets to run a normal protection plan for the first time in a month. If he is not, Andersen stays out at tackle, the line gets shuffled again, and Bailey throws 40 more times because that is what the roster permits. Watch who takes the first handoff. Gause earned the job by default last week and held up fine; doing it against a defense that knows he is the only back is harder.
For what it's worth in the standings math, an NC State win puts the Wolfpack's chance of reaching the ACC championship game around 4%, a loss drops it near 0.3%. Those are small numbers either way, and this game is not really about them. It is about whether an offense that keeps losing pieces can score enough to keep a good defensive afternoon from going to waste. In the building where this version of NC State football started.
Full numbers are in the interactive guide, and the forecasting details are in the methodology.