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The ACC Question of the week is back with our esteemed friend and college football writer @MattZemek, Editor at @TrojansWire .
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Answers to questions can simultaneously be simple and layered. They can be clear yet require explanation. Such is the case with this question about North Carolina State head coach Dave Doeren: Is this his best coaching job with the Wolfpack?
The answer is yes… but it requires some explanation.
Doeren is on his way to an eight-win season in 2020. The Wolfpack, however, are not going to make a New Year’s Six bowl game — not with Clemson, Notre Dame, and Miami all in front of the Pack, and with Miami having beaten N.C. State with a late rally in Raleigh. One can look at the 2018 N.C. State team and say, quite clearly, that the 2018 Pack would beat this team. That was a better squad with more raw talent. North Carolina State went to the Gator Bowl, which is the ceiling for this program in terms of its bowl history.
Yet, that last point — that North Carolina State never gets beyond the Gator Bowl as its postseason ceiling — is precisely part of why the 2020 Wolfpack have been Doeren’s best achievement and, hence, his best coaching job in Raleigh.
The 2018 team, as good as it was — and even though it won nine regular-season games, which is as good as it gets at N.C. State — slipped on the banana peel in a late-season home loss to Wake Forest. Even when State is good, there’s always that one game which trips up the Pack and keeps them from a New Year’s Six bowl, which the program has STILL never reached in its entire existence.
(The Wolfpack have made the Peach Bowl several times, but not when the game had the top-tier status it owns today. The Cotton Bowl is part of a multi-stage historical reality in which it didn’t always have top-tier bowl status, specifically from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, but regained that status with the NY6. The Peach never had top status until the NY6 granted it in 2014. State has never made a bowl when that specific bowl possessed elite status in college football.)
Given what Doeren and offensive coordinator Tim Beck have done after Devin Leary went down has been uniquely impressive. Other North Carolina State teams have not responded nearly as well to a critical injury. That this Wolfpack team has shown such notable resilience in a pandemic adds to this team’s place in program lore.
So yes, it’s clear that this is Doeren’s best coaching job… but partly because 2018 fell short of its promise, chiefly due to the loss to Wake Forest.
It’s not just because 2020 has been great, but because 2018 didn’t quite become everything it could have been.
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