NC State should fire Dave Doeren. The Stanford loss confirmed something: NC State has been losing this exact way all season, and fourteen seasons under the same coach is plenty of time to recognize a pattern.
Strip away the final score and look at what actually happened in the fourth quarter: NC State had too many players on the field on multiple occasions, and too few on the field for a Stanford field goal attempt. Penalties wiped out a 47-yard touchdown and a 20-yard run. The Wolfpack burned through timeouts and clock-management discipline late enough that they were down to one timeout on the final defensive stand, and after NC State's own onside kick following its final touchdown went uncovered and Stanford recovered it, NC State didn't have the clock or the composure left to answer. Those are coaching failures: putting the correct eleven players on the field, knowing when to call a timeout. A program in its fourteenth year under the same head coach should not still be getting that wrong in October.
The travel excuse deserves a real answer. A late West Coast kickoff genuinely is a disadvantage for a team flying across the country, and NC State made that trip short-handed, without multiple offensive linemen and without its leading rusher, losing another lineman during the game and finishing with a fourth-string center. That's a legitimate problem. But jet lag doesn't put twelve men on the field. It doesn't cost you a 47-yard touchdown on a penalty. Those are execution and discipline failures that have shown up all season, against opponents who weren't three time zones away. Stanford entered this game with a losing conference record under a first-year head coach. Losing to that team means the floor is falling in further.
This fits a season-long pattern. NC State opened the season getting blown out at Virginia, lost in agonizing, self-inflicted fashion at Vanderbilt on a late fumble at the goal line, then got run off the field at home by Wake Forest, 38-14. By the time Stanford was final, national outlets had already put Doeren on hot-seat lists, and the reasoning behind that ranking was simple: NC State has gone 9-12 against Power Four opponents since 2024, with the bulk of those losses coming by double digits. One bad Friday night wouldn't have fans calling for Doeren's job. A season of these same failures against the level of competition NC State is supposed to beat will.
It hasn't happened because athletic director Boo Corrigan has already told everyone it won't, at least not now. "I don't believe in firing coaches mid-year," Corrigan said last season, adding that "winning is really hard" and that the program needs "to find a way to get better." That's a defensible philosophy in the abstract, and it buys Doeren the rest of this season no matter how bad it gets. It's also convenient cover: the number attached to moving on from him before the new year is $9.75 million in owed buyout, a figure that makes patience look like principle. He's protecting a budget line.
The coaching has been bad enough, repeatedly enough, to justify ending it, and the man who could end it has already said he won't: a $9.75 million buyout is why. NC State fans calling for a firing have correctly diagnosed the problem, even if they're off on timing. The administration has made clear it isn't interested in writing that check in the middle of a season it can still survive to bowl eligibility. Doeren will coach out the schedule. He shouldn't be coaching NC State next season.
