Gavin Holmes is the other DB you're thinking of.
When Carson and Holmes were both out, it wrecked Wake's defense when WF had to put Ja'Sir Taylor and Isaiah Wingfield at the outside CB spots and Zion Keith at nickel. Which is why my first question to Clawson yesterday was "what affect did losing Caelen and Gavin have on the defense?" Because when WF was healthy at CB, Taylor was locking up Josh Downs better than anybody else in the ACC has this season.
Full answer was: "It was just, you know, we were going to play Ja’Sir at nickel and then as soon as we put Zion out there, they started throwing bombs at him. Then we had to play a lot more zone than we wanted to, and it made us soft against the run. It was just – you know, you can survive it. You lose two and it got really hard."
And it's a safe argument that while State doesn't have a receiver as good as Downs, they've got a deeper and more talented WR corps all around. So that's a long way of saying ... they're going to need at least one of Carson/Holmes to be healthy, or the offense needs to be ready to score 50-plus again.