FSU Football: 3 players that need to make impact against Wake

FSU Football faces a scrappy Wake Forest team that’s played them tough the last two seasons. We look at three player that need to make an impact for FSU.

I’m not going to waste a whole lot of time talking about FSU football and what they need to do to win the game. We’ve covered that here in our three keys to victory post on Wednesday.

Here are the three players FSU needs to step up on Saturday to make their path to victory easier.

• Stanford Samuels-Stanford Samuels has been relatively quite this season since making the move from cornerback to safety. Ironically, he’s only three tackles shy of his entire season total from 2017. Despite that production it’s almost like he hasn’t been on the field which tells me he’s not made a ton of impact plays although he does have one interception. FSU football needs him to show up tomorrow with Greg Dortch looking to get in space and make plays for Wake Forest.

• Cam Akers-Cam Akers hasn’t lived up to expectations(nor his) this season through the first six games. He’ll need to average 100 yards per game the rest of the season to eclipse the 1,000 yard mark like he did as a true freshman. It’s partly his fault, the offensive line and the quarterback making the wrong decision on RPO’s. However, he might be coming off his best game against Miami where he ran extremely hard for some tough yards. The Demon Deas struggle against the run and it could be time for Akers to break loose for a huge game.

• Deondre Francois-The ‘Noles offense is only going to be as good as Francois can be at running the RPO game correctly. It’s something he still struggles with and FSU will never run at maximum efficiency if this doesn’t improve. He also had to avoid turning the ball over, especially deep in his own territory which doesn’t give the FSU defense a solid shot of stopping an opponent from scoring.

Thoughts

The Noles need big games from these three guys with the biggest need being Deondre Francois. It’s imperative he show a better grasp of the offense in this one with the toughest slate of games coming up in the next three weeks.

He’s still leaving a lot of free yards on the field from making the wrong decision at the line of scrimmage.

Those decisions impact the running game and also the defense, because an inefficient offense means more snaps than usual for the defense on the field which is bad news for an offense that likes to run tempo like Wake Forest.