I have to say that I did not anticipate someone from Technician launching a haymaker at Dave Doeren here in peak optimism season, mere weeks from the start of the 2026 campaign, but the kids these days are full of surprises! Some of you may be pondering various position battles, but Presley Cox is thinking about packing up Dave’s office.
That column hits on many familiar notes expressed elsewhere by other, equally impatient people, a group which seems to grow larger by the season. There’s a notable lack of context in a good portion of the column, but that doesn’t make it any different than your typical message board screed after a tough loss—so in a way, football season is already here.
The reasonable points are sprinkled amid the silly (like the notion that “NC State has quietly turned into an NFL pipeline”) but regardless, I struggle to take seriously any coaching discussion which doesn’t consider the single most important factor to success on the field in this era, and that’s money. We can’t have an honest talk about NC State’s ceiling in football, or Dave’s ability to reach it, without talking about NIL, and State’s budget by P4 standards is pretty low. If you still think he’s underachieving in spite of this, well, you would, wouldn’t you? But I’d say that opinion is out of date by about five years.
I’m sure we can (and will) get into all of that eventually—we’ll be tearing each other’s heads off in no time flat should the season start slowly, I have no doubt. Very soon, NC State football could be confirming everyone’s priors. But maybe this is just the bulletin board material that Dave needed. Right now he’s probably in his office feverishly scribbling plays all over the walls. He’s watching double the amount of film he does normally, at three-times speed. He’s in such a zone synthesizing the results that he is reaching heretofore unfathomable levels of insight. What he will unleash this fall has never so much as been hinted at before.
I had been down on this team, but now … now I think I’m on board.