We're at the End Now with Dave Doeren

Following NC State’s 9-4 (6-2) season in 2017, a year in which it lost an Atlantic Division-deciding game by about 10 yards, I wrote a lengthy article about the foundation that had been laid in Raleigh. The key point was that such a season was not the product of a perfect storm. It was merely the first. Even though it came up short, it was about to create an extended window to play the role of contender because a viable process for elevating the program had been established. 

This turned out to be true. In 2021 and 2023, State played in a high-leverage game that ultimately decided ACC Championship game representation. In 2018 and 2020, State ended up one result shy of playing in what was then called a New Year's Six Bowl. That’s five times in a seven-year span that State was a legitimate contender for one of those two groundbreaking results. 

That consistent presence near the front of the race was the gas that powered the Doeren tenure. The overused line is that he raised the floor, but he did a lot more than that, posting a conference winning percentage of .750 three times in seven years. Prior to 2017, State had done that two times total since the ACC went to 8 games in 1992. If you were offered ACC contender status in roughly half your seasons going forward from right now, you would take that as a State fan without a second thought. If you disagree with that, this whole sports thing might not be for you. The trajectory of that is objectively fantastic in the context of NC State Football.

The hang up is that State cashed in none of these opportunities. It shot 0%, and that's what widdles away at people's patience. The difference between almost and actually is both incredibly tiny and extremely vast. Doeren never delivered a big hit. The postseason highlight of the last 13 years was beating 7-5 Arizona State in El Paso. That's pretty underwhelming given what it was almost able to do, and that kind of thing wears people down. 

That’s the big knock on the tenure, but it’s not the reason we’re at the end. The idea that there is some magical concrete ceiling at nine wins that Doeren would never clear is absurd. It just isn't how the games work. If it was reasonable to expect three years of title contention over the next seven, I’d still be all over it. But it’s not. The foundation has become rickety, and the deterioration of what made State an overachiever is how we’ve reached what feels like the natural conclusion.

Doeren made a living on talent evaluation and development. He would sprinkle in enough recruiting scores to have some star power, he would find some star power in obscure corners of the talent pool, and he had a small enough number of busts to have a solid base on the roster. State was ranked for 40 weeks from 2017 to 2023 despite only starting ranked once. It never had a single top 25 recruiting class. 

This was the outward-facing identity of the program. Come here, work hard, develop. The value of such a thing faded when the NIL bills started passing and player movement exploded. Doeren isn’t unwilling to change, but he's been unsuccessful in his attempts. The seismic shift in the sport meeting him right at the end of his career was a bad combination. State had done well to supplement its talent with transfers before, but 2024 was the first year it tried to build a team out of the portal. That was not a good year, and it was the first real year that it was painfully obvious State had underperformed the talent it had brought in. 

It was that offseason leading up to the 2024 campaign where the needle moved the wrong way. State’s hyperactivity in the portal was a big swing at a talent infusion trying to capitalize on the momentum of the program. It brought in a lot of instant-impact players, which prompted only the second-ever preseason ranking for Doeren. The on-field performance was rough.

Everything about this was broken. State spent heavily on the offense and largely ignored the defense. Grayson McCall struggled, Jordan Waters flopped, and the receiver additions left a lot on the field. Anae wanted to be at least partially a gap scheme team, but State did not recruit any tight ends who could block. If you wanted to run these things out of 10 or 20 personnel with McCall's legs as at least a read component, then okay, but they didn’t really do that. Zeke Correll and Hollywood Smothers were scores from that portal class, but the play calling muted their impact with a high volume of dropbacks and the random mid-season emphasis on the QB run game. It ended up feeling like a hodgepodge of unrelated components trying and failing to conglomerate.

Cultural fissures looked to have formed for the first time in years as well. A couple of ostensibly key defensive pieces rolled out mid-season. Then at the end of the season, promising development projects like Brandon Cisse and Tamarcus Cooley hit the road as Doeren started feeling the financial squeeze for the first time.

Our current season also falls in a similar category, just to a lesser degree. This does not feel like a well-coached football team. The quarterback regression from the early weeks has been alarming, but not as alarming as the inability to get assignments right and play the base components of the quarters coverage scheme correctly. It's easy to blame injuries for this, but both game-one starters at safety have been arguably the biggest culprits. The route distributions of Eliot’s zone/match coverages are just terrible. State has obvious talent limitations in several places, but it isn't doing the things it can control at an adequate level.

The Pack has no identity on the field. Inconsistent is the kindest word you could use to describe an offense that gets an explosive run or two per game from America’s best running back, but does almost nothing else well. Defensively, State has modernized the scheme, evidence of Doeren’s interest in changing, but it’s disjointed as hell. The run defense is decent, so there’s that, but why bother running the ball against the Wolfpack at all? It's honestly felt absent an identity for the last two seasons. I cannot tell you who this team is supposed to be this year. I thought you might see a meaningful turn after the bye week, but State looked like it might as well have just flown straight from South Bend to Pittsburgh. Nothing was different. 

State has not transitioned into the new world very efficiently. Its management of resources hasn't been great with some of the players it's decided to spend on, and it's gotten little value out of its largest expenditures. The hit rate isn't high enough and the positional distribution of the cash has been hard to retroactively justify. It really stubbed its toe with some of these decisions that it previously did not have to make. From 2020 to 2023, Doeren was 23-11 in the ACC. Since, he's 4-8. There's a pretty clear line of demarcation lying right between the 2023 and 2024 season. I have a hard time seeing that as random.

Doeren was always good at taking athletes and finding their spots. Jakobi Meyers came in as a QB. Bradley Chubb was technically a LB. Garrett Bradbury was a TE and a DL. Germaine Pratt moved positions. Nobody really knew what Jaylen Samuels was. Not enough people remember how much of a disaster Tanner Ingle was as a freshman trying to play nickel. These are all guys who showed up as projects and were molded by the program in one way or another. Doeren's strength was being able to contort the puzzle pieces to make them fit. The pieces are harder to twist and bend now, and when you can manage to do that, somebody else can sneak in and snatch them.

When you don't have money, you have to turn less into more. This is hard, this is a prerequisite for winning here, and this was accomplished by Doeren. More no longer lasts, though. When raiders can just wait until you have done the dirty work and then swoop in, that shifts the balance of coaching vs. funding. This was never the primary issue for Dave. Last year's secondary was the only time he's ever been truly raided. It is, however, a battle going forward, and one I imagine Dave doesn't have a lot of interest in fighting.

This is the program struggling to relocate its fastball. State has not generated a ton of value from the portal lately and its ability to lean on what once made it an intriguing buy is shrinking. All the while, it's looking over its shoulder at the sport's power players. The Pack largely needs a new plan for navigating the college football arms race, which starts with addressing the fundraising issue and finishes with a new approach to the use of finances, talent evaluation, and an understanding of what wins and loses now vs. 10 years ago. 

That's about where we're at, at a point of profound change in the sport with leadership whose systems are fighting substantial friction. Doeren isn’t going to be fired, because he’s just going to retire at the end of the year. He never wanted to do this forever, and he’s said so publicly. I will personally be quite surprised if this ends any other way, and it's the right way for it to end, with the long-tenured coach heading off to catch bass in Lake Gaston on his own terms (skip a senko under the docks in Jimmies creek, Dave).

You will never make me hate Dave Doeren. I understand some people have a championship or bust mentality and he didn't deliver one. I can respect that. I still believe the work to elevate the whole program should be acknowledged for the difficulty of it, as should the fact that it was about as clean as you could be in college football. There is no question we're at the end, though. It's time for something new.

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