Dave Doeren in rare company as he starts Year 9. This NC State team may be his best yet
College coaches come and college football coaches go.
A constant churn after unimpressive seasons that leave the fan base restless.
Recruiting classes may stick around five years and play for two, sometimes three coaches during their tenure.
N.C. State has played football since 1892, with 33 different head coaches. The longest-tenured coach, Earle Edwards, roamed the sidelines for the Wolfpack for 16 seasons, winning 77 games, the most in school history. Nipping at his heels (for tenure and wins) is David William Doeren, a Midwesterner who has made an impact in the South.
As N.C. State opens its 2021 season at home versus South Florida on Thursday night, it will mark the start of season nine in Raleigh for Dave Doeren. At 49 years old, he has 55 career wins, and if he makes it to 16 years, like Edwards, he would easily become the winningest coach in school history.
Nine years at one school doesn’t seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, Doeren is the third longest-tenured coach in the ACC. Only David Cutcliffe (Duke) and Dabo Swinney (Clemson) have been with their schools longer.
In April, Doeren was awarded a contract extension, keeping him in Raleigh until through the 2025 season. In nine seasons, Doeren has averaged 6.8 wins per year. Keep that average for five more seasons and that’ll put him 12 wins better than Edwards’ record. The hope is Doeren doesn’t have many six-win seasons in the future. He’s won eight or more games four times in eight years, including back-to-back nine-win seasons in 2017 and 2018.
Last year’s 8-4 COVID season was a bounce-back year after going 4-8 in 2019. If there was a season fans had a legitimate beef to get Doeren out of Raleigh, that was it. But athletic director Boo Corrigan has his own process for evaluating coaches, one that doesn’t include checking fans’ comments on social media.
“Being able to be around the team, on practice or on trips, trying to observe everything,” Corrigan said. “Clearly it was a situation where he still had the team locked in. He had earned that right to be able to build back up and that’s certainly what we did last year.”
Adjusting over time
Doeren had a phone conversation this summer with Chris Ash, a coaching buddy of his, who has been on some of the same staffs as Doeren.
Ash, the former head coach at Rutgers who’s now the defensive backs coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars, was talking to Doeren about life in the NFL when something dawned on him.
“He’s like dude, you’re almost at a school for a decade,” Doeren recalled. “And he just started laughing. I mean, it’s hard because I still look at myself as somewhat of a young coach.”
But the young old Doeren has adjusted with the times. Look at the N.C. State TikTok account and there’s Doeren starring in front of the camera.
“I feel like he’s been able to adapt to the players that have come in,” fifth-year wide receiver Emeka Emezie said. “Every single year it’s a different vibe to the team and you’ll see how he’s been accustomed to the different teams that we’ve had.”
Emezie elaborated, noting how Doeren is willing to adjust to the personnel and not being stuck in his ways when it comes to Xs and Os.
“Maybe this worked for the last team, maybe we need to try this, or try that, it’s not the same thing every year,” Emezie said. “He’s able to understand each team, each dynamic and adapt to all of us which is really good as a head coach to be able to understand that and go with the flow of the team.”
While his approach to the flow of the team changes based on the Jimmy’s and Joe’s, Doeren has been as steady as they come since he arrived in 2013. That first year ended with a forgettable 3-9 record. Five straight winning seasons, with five consecutive bowl games, followed. And the 2019 season was about as good as things could have gone with so many injuries and revolving pieces throughout the lineup.
Doeren played more freshman than he ever has that season, and it was evident with the product on the field. But with the recruiting classes he brought in 2018 and ‘19, Doeren never wavered, knowing better days were coming. Players followed that lead.
“Coach Doeren is kind of the same thing every day,” linebacker Payton Wilson said. “He’s very consistent, very motivated. He’s going to bring the same energy to the table. One thing that he’s done, a lot of credit to him, he brought us from a 4-9 team to a team that’s in the conversation (again). In 2019, we were a bottom-tier team in college football, for him to stay on us and develop us so well and to get us to the point we are now, says a lot about him and who he is as a coach.”
Wilson was the prize recruit of that 2018 class and the players he’s brought in and the way he’s developed them is something Doeren is proud of during his time in Raleigh. To bring in a two-star linebacker and turn him into an early NFL selection (Bradley Chubb) is the kind of thing Doeren is known for. It’s part of the reason why even though UNC is loading up with five-star recruits under Mack Brown, Doeren’s development of lower-ranked players has churned out future pros year after year.
“What our former players have done in the NFL, the way they talk about our team, our coaches,” Doeren said. “There’s just a lot to it.”
Backing Dave Doeren
Corrigan arrived in May 2019, taking over for Debbie Yow, the outgoing A.D. who hired Doeren away from Northern Illinois seven years earlier.
Corrigan had some evaluating to do of his new football coach, who was coming off a 9-4 season and a trip to the Gator Bowl. Some athletic directors, especially ones who didn’t hire, but inherited head coaches, like to bring in their own coaches the first chance they get. That was never the mindset for Corrigan, he said, preferring to put himself in the coach’s shoes.
“My kind of ongoing philosophy about this is that every new coach we hire, we expect them to take every single student that’s here and make them theirs,” Corrigan said. “So I take the same approach from a leadership standpoint.”
Corrigan wasn’t interested in making a hire that was right for him. He said he wanted to do what was right for the university and the community. Under Doeren, members of the football team have turned in more than 7,000 hours of community service. The football team has won the N.C. State Athletics Community Service Award twice under the coach. Along with his wife Sara, Doeren has raised money and brought awareness to special needs education across Wake County. He’s embedded in the community, having raised his three sons in the Wake County School system since they were in grade school.
“It’s a total blessing that Sarah and I’ve been able to be here this long,” Doeren said. “And we hope that we’re here for the duration, until I’m done with this sport, or this sport is done with me.”
The only legitimate concern over Doeren leaving Raleigh was in 2017 when he had a chance to become the coach at Tennessee. But he opted to remain with the Wolfpack and signed a contract extension that ran through 2022, which was re-upped by his latest extension last spring.
Doeren said he loves Raleigh, the fan base that doesn’t always love him back and what the North Carolina offers geographically. He hopes to be around for a long time to take advantage of the mountains and beaches.
Edwards, the record-setting coach, went 3-6-1 in his ninth season, but had three straight seasons as the top team in the ACC after that. A lot has to go wrong for Doeren to finish with just three wins in his ninth year, with his most experienced team ever returning. As it stands, regardless, he enters Year 9 with the total backing of the administration.
“We have someone we believe in,” Corrigan said. “We believe in the coaches he has around him. Backing Dave and supporting Dave is the right thing to do.”
South Florida at NC State
▪ When: Thursday, Sept. 2
▪ Time: 7:30 p.m.
▪ TV: ACCN
▪ Betting line: N.C. State is an 18-point favorite
▪ Series history: The two teams have met three times. N.C. State holds a 2-1 advantage.
