NC State fired Dave Doeren on Saturday, a day after a 31-28 loss at Stanford, and the only honest reaction is: what took so long? It was a bill coming due years after it should have been paid, and the man who kept running up the tab is athletic director Boo Corrigan.
Doeren built the most consistent stretch of football this program has ever had. He became its winningest coach, around 98 wins over a tenure that started in 2013, and by Saturday he was the fourth-longest-tenured coach in the FBS. He kept NC State respectable and in bowl games, and kept churning out NFL players, around 29 to 30 draft picks on his watch. That counts for something. It's the floor of a decent Power Four program, and he held it a long time.
But the floor was also the ceiling. Doeren never won more than nine games in a season. He never got the Wolfpack to an ACC championship game, not once in more than a decade. This year, before the end came, NC State sat at 3-4, 1-3 in the league, and outside of one upset of Louisville it was 0-4 against Power Four opponents. That mix, solid but never threatening, had been obvious for years. The Stanford loss gave Corrigan the excuse he should have taken a long time ago.
The administration kept rewarding stasis as if it were growth. They extended Doeren through 2026 on a deal paying him $5 million a year, up from $3.5 million, after a season in which he was piling up wins without ever threatening the top of the sport. As recently as last fall, with fans already souring, Corrigan went out of his way to publicly back him, pointing out the Wolfpack was in better shape than the programs firing their coaches at the time. It looks like Corrigan talking himself into the thing he wanted to believe.
You can make the case that NC State simply isn't a top-tier job, that the only 10-win season in school history belongs to Chuck Amato's 2002 team with Philip Rivers, and that keeping a steady, winning coach was the smart play. Fine. But if the ceiling really is that low, then handing Doeren $5 million a year and defending him in public only makes the decision look worse. You don't pay premium money and burn political capital on a coach who, by your own logic, was always going to land right where he landed.
There's a version of this where Doeren never got enough time, got undone by a portal that shipped starters off to Texas, Alabama, South Carolina and USC. Thirteen years is plenty of time, and everybody loses players to the portal now. The ones who win keep reloading anyway. NC State never did.
The timing is almost comic. Four years ago Doeren and Mike Locksley shared a field in the Duke's Mayo Bowl, a 16-12 Maryland win in a game nobody remembers. Locksley got fired this week too, three days before Doeren. Two coaches who met in a mid-tier bowl, both out within the same October, stuck at the same ceiling until their bosses finally noticed.
Todd Goebbel takes over as interim, and a national search starts immediately, with nothing settled yet about who's next. NC State can feel hopeful about that. It should feel angry that this day was obvious seasons ago, and that the man who delayed it is still the one picking the next coach. Doeren did what he always did until the people paying him ran out of patience. Corrigan should have run out years sooner.
