WATCH: NC State DE Isaiah Shirley has Made the Most of his Opportunities (with transcript)

NC State Redshirt Freshman Defensive End Isaiah Shirley has made the most of his opportunities this season, and according to Wolfpack head coach Dave Doeren, you can expect to see more of him on the football field as a result. Shirley met with the media after practice this week leading up to the Pack’s game against Northern Illinois tomorrow.

You can watch the video ABOVE, and read the transcript BELOW.

First career sack against Western Carolina. What went right on that play and how did it feel to make that game ending stop?

Well, I got a run through. No one actually blocked me on that play.

So we had a blitz on, everybody ran their blitz tracks. They didn’t have enough to block us and I was just having to be that guy on the edge that came free and made our layup, made the play. And couldn’t have done it without the linebackers.

They had their tracks, the rest of my teammates had their tracks. So I’m thankful for that. When I got up, I didn’t realize the ball was fumbled.

I was kind of just excited and something I’ve been thinking about since I committed here. So I was really thankful for the opportunity, and it was great.

One of the things that Coach Doeren said on Monday that there would be more competition and intensity in practice. Have you seen that?

Yeah, no, the intensity, the competitiveness that we had today was was really back, it felt like fall camp again, really.

I mean, guys were flying around, different guys in there moving around, just really trying to create some competitive depth in the room. That’s what you need, I think, to be successful at this level, is competitive depth.

And that’s something that we’re developing right now, and you can see it in the way we practice.

It’s a long season too, can you do that every week? Or is that something that just has to be kind of sporadically?

I think what we do here, hard, tough, together, if we wanna get back to our identity, that’s something that we need to do. At least every Tuesday, we need to be competitive, flying around, and if that’s less physical, you still need to be going fast.

There’s no reason to be on the field and going slow, because you never know when it might happen.

When a coach says, ‘well, we’re gonna make some changes on defense’ or something like that, what does that say to a player when you hear a coach say that?

I’m just saying that we got, whoever it is, we’ve got to log in and get ready to see, trust the coaches, remember the changes, trust them, and know that they wanna win just as bad as we do. And whatever that is, just trust your coach, do what you’re being coached to do, and go from there, and solid ball, play ball hard.

Have you had some of the older guys, leaders, just kind of step up at practice today, possibly?

Yeah, all around, Caden Fordham, all those guys, the veteran guys, we’re just out there flying around, giving calls. Brandon Cleveland in the middle was just giving calls. I mean, everybody out there was flying around, communication was on point, and that’s something I think we need to continue to do in the future before we continue with success.

What’s been the most difficult part of the past few days as you digest what happened to Clemson and you kind of turned the page? What’s kind of been the hardest thing for you all as a team?

I think the hardest thing for anybody in the world, is just being honest with ourselves. We have to be able to look at it, eat it, look at the film and know that’s what we put on film, and we gotta do what we gotta do to fix it and move on.

I think the hardest part is just swallowing that pill of we put that on film. Yeah, that’s on film forever, but that doesn’t define us. We move forward, and the good thing about football, you get another week, and we get to change that narrative.