Dave Doeren met with the media one last time to reflect on his 14 years with the Wolfpack, discuss college football's changing landscape, thank the NC State community, and more.
NOTE: Click the video above to watch the full press conference!
Former NC State head coach Dave Doeren:
Good. All right, let’s get right to it.
First, I want to thank my family.
My wife, Sara, has been my rock, and we absolutely loved making Raleigh our home.
We came here to put down roots. roots
Fourteen years ago, our boys, Jacob, Luke, and Connor, were very young, and my goal was to avoid moving them, which meant staying at NC State for 12 years.
That was a pretty lofty goal at the time, although I didn’t think it was.
I’ve always set really high goals.
I want to use this moment to thank a lot of people. So many people have been a part of our journey here at NC State.
I want to start with Debbie Yow and Chancellor Woodson, who gave me the opportunity to become the head coach here, and thank them both for that.
Boo Corrigan has been a great boss. He’s been a confidant.
Boo Corrigan has been an incredible boss, confidant, and leader, and he’s a great human being.
I appreciate how he and his family have treated the Doeren family over the years.
I want to thank all the coaches who have worked here over the past 14 years.
It takes a village to do this job.
I’ve had the honor of working with many great men and women, and I’m a better man and coach because of the bonds so many of us share.
I take great pride in seeing so many staff members move up in this profession over the years as coordinators, head coaches, and NFL coaches.
To my mentor and close friend Ruffin McNeill, I will miss you the most of all.
I cannot thank you enough for your love, support, conversations, and the time we shared.
I want to thank all the support staff I’ve had over my tenure, especially Annabelle Myers.
No one is better than her in this business.
Your operations staff is like your right hand.
Kevin Cristello has been amazing this year, as have Adam Clark before him and Joe McKillop before him. Just three incredible guys.
Henry Trevathan, who retired last year, was an amazing director of high school relations.
Terry Calloway, who we call Country, has been with me since Wisconsin. He’s just one of the best human beings on the planet.
Our athletic training staff includes Justin Smith, who was here with me for a long time, and Kevin Siesel now.
Our strength staff, led by Dantonio Burnette, has had many great assistants, and they do a tremendous job.
In academics, Katie Graham and Ashley Grigsby do a terrific job with our student-athletes.
This year, our nutritionist, Jaelyn Shipman, is a rock star. She was just a great addition.
When I got hired here, the recruiting staff had one person, and now it's grown.
Those people work long hours. They watch a lot of film. They do a lot of tours.
Natalie Brincefield and Denise Ritter, our executive and administrative assistants, have just been great.
I want to thank my players.
For 14 years, I’ve had the honor of working with many amazing young men, coaching, leading, mentoring, and sharing highs and lows with them.
It’s been an absolute privilege to coach you.
Thank you to so many of you who have reached out over the last couple of days. They’ve been tough days.
I’ve always said that our relationship was for life, and I mean that.
I always will.
For these guys who are here, change is hard.
As I told them when I met with them, go be great.
You know what to do.
Live up to your gift, and don’t let anyone tell you what you can’t do.
I’ve coached for 32 years, and I’ve never been unemployed.
These last few days in October, waking up with an empty calendar and no alarm clock, have been very different.
Waking up on a Monday morning and not thinking about the next game, the last game, or what’s going on — I’ve never had that in my life.
It’s been different.
I love this university.
I leave here knowing that I made it better than I found it, on and off the field.
I wanted so badly to win a championship here at NC State, but I will be cheering for this program to get there under its future leadership.
I want to thank all the North Carolina high school coaches for making me feel at home.
I’ve been all over the country as an assistant, but I had never been in the Carolinas as a full-time employee.
So many of them, great leaders and great men leading high school programs, took the time to get to know me and teach me about this state's culture.
They took a vested interest, and I appreciate that.
I've met many great mentors over the years who are high school coaches here.
I took it personally to keep their players at home.
We fought hard in recruiting to keep the best players home, and over the years we opened our doors to these high school coaches to help them grow professionally.
It’s always been an open-door policy with me.
I want to thank the NC State coaching community.
So many of the coaches, current and former, have been great to my family and me, and we’ve built some really special relationships over the years.
Coach Pat Popolizio, so much respect for what you do.
Coach Wes Moore, a great friend. We’ve had so many conversations over the years.
Coach Keatts, thank you for your time here.
Coach Rollie Geiger, just a rock at this school for so long.
And my close friend Elliott Avent.
On my first day here, he came up to me after my press conference and offered me his place at Emerald Isle.
He said, “Take your wife and kids there.”
I’m like, “Man, I’ve never even met this guy, and he’s giving me his beach house.”
Just an amazing human being.
Bobby Purcell, I can’t say enough about Bobby.
Still to this day, he is the only person at NC State who, every single week of the season that we had a game, would text me, “Good luck. We’re pulling for you.”
Just an amazing human being.
I’m thankful to have been in Bobby Purcell’s circle, and I'm thankful to Ben Broussard for his hard work.
I have no idea what’s next for me, but I’m excited about my future.
I’m excited to reset.
I’m excited to spend more time with my family and close friends, travel, golf, and fish.
I haven't traveled in the fall since fourth grade.
Fall has always been football.
That’s when I started playing, and I’ve never had a vacation or seen anything that didn’t revolve around football.
I look forward to that and some downtime with some damn good people.
This is not how I wanted to go out.
But the more I thought about it, honestly, how many coaches get to go out the way they wanted?
I don’t think that’s how it works.
This is a great job at NC State.
It’s also a very hard job.
When I took this job, I knew what pre-NIL and the transfer portal were, and I felt like we had a plan.
I thrived on developing players, often underappreciated players, diamonds in the rough, as some people call them.
We had a way to identify guys, develop them, and turn a two-star or three-star player into a five-star player.
That motivated me.
Doing more with less.
We were good at it.
I loved beating teams with five-star players because we developed our guys over time.
That was a credit to our staff and to those young men who could do it.
You could build depth on your roster.
You could develop a senior, a junior, a sophomore, a freshman, or a redshirt player the hard way.
That changed in a tough way when NIL and the transfer portal started, not just at NC State, but at many schools.
As much as we battled and tried to keep up, the revenue-sharing and NIL gap in college football made it harder and harder to maintain proven, competitive depth.
For some programs, it's become really difficult to maintain guys who aren't just your starters, but your backups, who have played Power Four football and have stats to prove it.
For some, it’s not.
For some, it is.
This new NIL era doesn’t work unless you stay 100% healthy or have the money to get starters and backups who can switch in and out without a drop-off.
You see that at some places and not at others.
Our former developmental players, backups, and third-teamers became really good football players here.
Once the transfer portal and NIL shifted, those players left for money.
I don’t blame them.
They became players who could start elsewhere.
In many cases, you can go from your starting lineup to a freshman or redshirt freshman quickly.
Retention and acquisition are expensive and very competitive in the space we’re in now.
Everybody has different money.
They say there’s a cap, and they say there isn’t.
I think that’s one thing people need to understand.
There are haves and have-nots when it comes to how much money schools have in this space.
For as many great players as we’ve retained, we’ve also lost, on average, four potential NFL players a year over the last three years.
To me, losing talent affects how many wins you can have.
You can lose talent in many ways.
Injury is one of them.
Attrition is another.
A guy leaving early for the NFL is another.
But with the transfer portal, more players left your program, and in some cases, guys you didn't want to leave.
It’s sad to say, but that’s where football is now.
It’s in a state of: Do you have enough revenue-sharing and third-party NIL money not only to retain, but to acquire what you need to build a competitive depth chart that can sustain the injuries that happen in college football?
For this program to become what is wanted and expected, the resources need to match the expectations.
That is the reality in college sports.
I hope for NC State; if this commitment to football happens, I really want this program to win.
I want the next head coach — I pray for the next head coach — to have that opportunity.
It’s just not the way it used to be.
You can’t just recruit a class, develop them for four years, and make them better than everybody else’s players.
I’m so deeply thankful to the fans and students who cheered our players on.
When I first got here, we didn’t sell out.
We weren’t at capacity.
There were many empty seats.
A lot of the ones who were there left early.
I took a lot of heat for calling out fans who left early in my career.
But to your credit, that changed.
Carter-Finley is a party, man.
It’s special.
It’s special because of you and your commitment to being at the games and cheering on the players.
I look forward to tailgating with you one day.
For years, I’ve driven that route to the indoor facility for recruiting, and I’m like, “Man, these people are having a good time.”
Sara and I will be cheering for NC State forever.
I leave here with no grudges.
I completely love this place.
We want to see this program shock the world.
I might be in the mountains sometimes, sitting fishing in a lake, but I’ll always cheer, always cheer, always Packkerpack.
I promise you that.
This community took us in.
One of my sons graduated from NC State, and you made us love it here.
It was the people. It was the culture. Everything about it.
I’ve lived in many places across the country.
I’ve traveled across the country recruiting and seen a lot.
In my opinion, no state in this great country is like North Carolina.
It’s a special place to live.
We loved it here, and we love it here.
Since so many of the media have so nicely and eloquently critiqued me over my 14 years, I wanted to do a nice reporter-by-reporter critique.
Back to you.
I was going to go through your names one by one, put up your pictures, and make T-shirts about all of you.
But I decided against it.
Maybe later, on a podcast down by the river with a bottle of bourbon, that’ll happen.
That could happen.
Stay on target here, right, Annabelle?
A few other things.
I hope and pray that our program, OnePack Empowered, lives on.
I want to thank Sidney Fletcher, who runs the program, and his team so much for the work they’ve done on campus since we came up with that idea.
And thank you to Chancellor Woodson for helping us with that.
It’s fully staffed.
It has about 50 students and a waitlist.
This is our last year of giving, and we'll finish our last gift in March.
We hope that Chancellor Howell and the NC State academic community can find a way to keep that program going.
I think it has made a big difference for our family and our campus.
It has helped many students reach their goals and graduate from NC State.
I know it has given hope to many families with students with special needs.
Lastly, I hope my tenure will be something our fans and alumni can be proud of.
In 14 years, we never broke an NCAA rule.
Our team GPA rose from 2.1 to 3.1.
We won 98 games.
We packed our stadium.
We produced more than 32 NFL players.
We created OnePack Empowered.
We partnered with and fostered GiGi’s Playhouse in Raleigh and 321 Coffee.
Those participants joined our team for Victory Day.
We beat our rival five years in a row.
We had 11 bowl seasons out of 13 years.
We had the most eight- and nine-win seasons of any coach in school history.
We did that while Florida State, Clemson, and Louisville were all at their best in the Atlantic Division.
I know this year was disappointing, and I take full blame.
But we did a lot of good and a lot of great while I was here.
I loved it.
We built men who will be successful in this world, and I’m very, very proud of that.
I’m proud of these guys and thankful to them.
We did it the right way.
We did it hard, tough, and together. For the rest of this season, I ask that you stand behind these players and the staff who will keep working for you.
They have five games and deserve a fan base that cheers for them and gives them a chance to come together in tough times.
I know Boo and his staff will do a great job finding a first-rate football coach, and that’s a great man to stand up here and talk to you.
I won't take questions.
This is my press conference, and I won’t be talking to any of you for a while.
I want to say thank you for the relationships I do have with some of you.
I appreciate the coverage of these student-athletes, me, our coaches, and everything we’ve done.
I look forward to the future.
Go Pack.
