You did not want to be the head coach of a middle-class Power 4 program named Dave on Sunday. Baylor's Dave Aranda and NC State's Dave Doeren were both let go.
The Doeren move meant a lot to me personally. I started this job in 2012, which meant the Class of 2012 was my first to cover professionally. Doeren, hired Dec. 1, 2012, was the last of the bunch still around. Fourteen years is a long time in any context, and it's several lifetimes in college football.
It's impossible to summarize 14 seasons into 800 words, but here goes nothing.
What were the high and low points? Typically we separate these two categories, but they feel inseparable in Doeren's case. He reached a bowl game in 11 of his final 12 seasons. He posted three AP Top 25 seasons, which hadn't happened once since Philip Rivers's senior season of 2002. The Wolfpack are among the class of programs that benefit the most in the Playoff expanding from two, then four, then 12, and finally to 24 (all of which happened under Doeren's watch). At 98-74, Doeren exits with the most wins in NC State's history, and the second most losses.
And yet.
It feels impossible, but is sadly all too true that 13 programs qualified for the ACC Championship during Doeren's tenure, and NC State was not among them. North Carolina went. Duke went twice, and won it last year. Wake Forest went, and might go back again this year. NC State never did. Heck, SMU and Notre Dame beat NC State to the ACC Championship... and Notre Dame's not even in the ACC! Somehow, the Wolfpack are the captains of a club that also includes Boston College, Syracuse, Cal and Stanford.
The remarkable thing here is not necessarily that NC State never played for an ACC title under Doeren, it's that Doeren never played for an ACC championship but still lasted 14 seasons. By the same token that the Major League pitchers with the most all-time losses are almost all in the Hall of Fame, you have to give them a reason to keep you around for 14 seasons. Dave Doeren gave the Wolfpack a lot of good for 14 years, but never any great.
If we want to pinpoint the moment when Doeren's program was the absolute closest to breaking through, I think it's Nov. 4, 2017. Defending national champion Clemson came to Carter-Finley Stadium, and the Wolfpack had the Tigers on the ropes for much of the night. NC State had the ball with the lead four times that night, and those four drives went: missed field goal, punt, punt, punt. When Clemson's Tavien Feaster broke free for an 89-yard touchdown to put the Tigers up 31-21, NC State spent the rest of the night, and the rest of Doeren's tenure, chasing the best of the best in the ACC. That Wolfpack team finished a game behind Clemson in the ACC Atlantic, beat Arizona State in the Sun Bowl, and ended the program's 15-year drought of AP Top 25 finishes.
What did Doeren get right? You're not going to bat 1.000 on coordinator and assistant hires in 14 years anywhere, but Doeren's batting average would put him in the All-Star game. He won through an evolution in scheme and roster-building, and never had a major off-field scandal while managing an organization of 150-plus players, coaches and employees for a decade and a half.
What did Doeren get wrong? Losing to Stanford, as NC State did Saturday, is obviously a tough look, especially on the heels of a Wake Forest team that's on the cusp of doing something in Jake Dickert's second year that Doeren never did in 14. But there's nothing that's so aggressively worse about the 2026 Wolfpack than the 2024 team (which went 6-7 and 3-5 in ACC play) or the 4-8 squad of 2019. After 14 years, it was just time. Doeren's undoing was that he never stocked the emotional freezer to the point where the fan base could thaw some of those feel-good memories to get them through the seasons when the refrigerator was light on fresh food.
Where does NC State go from here? Boo Corrigan has been entrenched as NC State's AD since 2019 and, as the son of former ACC Commissioner and NCAA President Gene Corrigan, is a true college sports lifer with contacts up and down the industry. There are "in the box" and "outside the box" searches, and expect this one to be as inside the box as it gets. In other words, don't expect an out-of-left-field NFL assistant hire in Raleigh. Expect former coordinators Tony Gibson and Tim Beck to both make and receive calls, but this could go any number of directions and very few of them would be surprising. Philip Rivers has interest.
Where does Doeren go from here? To the beach, hopefully. Doeren won two MAC titles in two years a lifetime ago at Northern Illinois, and he'd be the belle of the ball during the upcoming MAC cycle. If Doeren wants to get back to actually coaching in 2027, the most natural fit is probably as Illinois's defensive coordinator. Doeren ran Bret Bielema's defense for three seasons at Wisconsin before taking the NIU job in 2011, and Illinois will be in the market for a coordinator after the Bobby Hauck era lasted all of four games.