N.C. State fires football coach Dave Doeren midway through his 14th season
N.C. State fired coach Dave Doeren on Saturday, ending a 14-season tenure in which he set the program’s all-time wins mark but could not make a breakthrough leap to higher success.
The school announced the decision less than a day after the Wolfpack fell to 3-4 by losing on the road against a Stanford team picked to finish last in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Doeren, 54, had a 98-74 record with the Wolfpack and became the program’s winningest coach with a 2023 victory over Miami. He entered this year as the fourth-longest-tenured coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision and second in the ACC behind Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.
“I want to thank Coach Doeren for his service and contributions to N.C. State, and for always representing the university with pride,” athletic director Boo Corrigan said in a statement. “I appreciate his leadership during his 14-year tenure and the passion he brought to this role. We wish Dave, (wife) Sara and his family the best in the future.”
Running backs coach and special teams coordinator Todd Goebbel will serve as interim coach for the remainder of the season.
Doeren built a consistent winner, with the Wolfpack securing 11 bowl bids with eight of those teams reaching eight or nine wins — including a 9-4 mark against rival North Carolina. Yet N.C. State never played for an ACC championship nor reached the 10-win threshold hit only once in program history, creating a ceiling that Doeren’s teams kept bumping into and that led to a steady but typically low-simmering level of fan frustration.
Then things went quickly awry in his 14th year.
First, the Wolfpack looked surprisingly overmatched in a loss at Virginia in August. A few weeks later came a loss at Vanderbilt on a last-second fumble recovery for a touchdown, one of the most stunning and improbable finishes in recent memory in college football.
Injuries mounted to compound emerging problems, which showed when N.C. State was outscored 28-0 after halftime in a home loss to Wake Forest on Oct. 10. The Wolfpack then went into an open week with a chance to regroup before visiting the Cardinal, which boasted one of the nation's worst offenses that failed to score more than seven points in any of the team's four losses.
But the Cardinal took a 14-0 first-quarter lead and built another two-touchdown advantage in the third quarter before winning 31-28, a result that ultimately removed whatever cushion Doeren had left.
His firing was hardly expected when the school announced after last year's fifth straight win against rival North Carolina to close the season that he would return.
Hired from Northern Illinois after the 2012 season, Doeren had occasionally been linked to other jobs, including talks with Tennessee in late 2017, but remained committed to the Wolfpack. That included shutting down in-season rumors last year that he might retire, then again after the school announced his return last November.
“I’m totally invested in this place,” Doeren told The Associated Press at the time. “I love this school and I plan on finishing here.”
Doeren’s Wolfpack flirted with breakthrough moments multiple times, but seizing one proved elusive.
N.C. State formerly shared an ACC division with Florida State and Clemson when each was a national power, making it a daunting task to try to run either team down and reach a league championship game. As an example, Doeren’s best team in 2017 won nine games and had seven players go in the NFL draft the following spring — including No. 5 overall pick Bradley Chubb at defensive end — but still lost a November home game to then-No. 6 Clemson and ultimately finished a game behind the Tigers in the division.
There were three other times that the Wolfpack reached a bowl game with a chance at a 10-win season. N.C. State lost two, while the 2021 Holiday Bowl matchup against UCLA was called off hours before kickoff because the Bruins had to pull out due to COVID-19 issues.
N.C. State’s only season with a double-digit win total was 2002, when the team led by eventual NFL great Philip Rivers and coached by the late Chuck Amato cracked the AP's top 10 and finished 11-3. Its last ACC crown came in 1979, a stat that loomed larger as the other three in-state league schools each twice reached the championship game, with Wake Forest (2006) and Duke (2025) winning titles.
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