Whatever you think of Dave Doeren, you can’t say NC State hasn’t given the man time.

The 2024 season is Year 12 for Doeren in Raleigh, making him the second longest-tenured head football coach in the ACC, behind Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.

Clemson, for what it’s worth, has won 8 ACC championships and advanced to the College Football Playoff 6 times under Swinney, winning 2 national titles.

For whatever reason, be it history or some media narrative about Tobacco Road or NC State being a basketball school, football expectations are lower at NC State than they are at Clemson.

One might ask whether they should be given NC State just advanced to the Final Four in men’s and women’s basketball and made the College World Series in baseball within the same calendar year, but let’s ignore that reality for a moment and simply accept that while NC State is the only true “football school” in talent-rich North Carolina, expectations are lower in Raleigh than they are on the banks of Lake Hartwell.

The facts are Dave Doeren has been given plenty of time to build whatever NC State believes is a true winner in Raleigh.

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Over the past 12 years, NC State’s administration has supported Doeren with new investments in facilities and football infrastructure, multiple assistant salary pool increases, and one of the ACC’s most well-organized NIL collectives.

In return, Doeren has advanced to bowl games in 9 of his 11 seasons. That might appear to be a reasonable return on investment for all of NC State’s support, I suppose, but look under the hood and you see the danger billowing below the surface.

Lurking behind 9 winning seasons is a sub-.500 ACC record (44-46) that includes 0 ACC championships. The Wolfpack haven’t even advanced to the ACC Championship Game in Doeren’s tenure. Would life have been easier on Doeren in the Coastal? Probably, but then again, Doeren also has a knack for losing big games.

Saturday night’s 51-10 embarrassment to No. 14 Tennessee was just the latest faceplant by a Doeren team on a national stage.

In 12 seasons, Doeren is just 7-26 against ranked opponents. While 9 of those losses are Textile Bowl defeats to Swinney’s Tigers, Doeren is just 5-17 against non-Clemson ranked teams, hardly a vindicating statistic.

The other issue?

Saturday night’s debacle at Bank of America Stadium was more evidence that progress isn’t being made at pushing beyond Doeren’s established 9-win ceiling.

After a strong close to the 2023 season, which included a win over Clemson, a victory over a red-hot Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and a rout of hated UNC at Carter-Finley Stadium, the Wolfpack brought in a loaded transfer portal class ranked in the top 10 of the 247 composite and returned 13 starters, including 8 on offense to complement transfer star quarterback Grayson McCall. The preseason buzz was the loudest in Doeren’s tenure — and with Clemson slipping and FSU rebuilding after a 13-1 season — the door was presumably open in the ACC.

The Pack struggled at times in a 38-21 win over Western Carolina in Week 1, but that was understandable, right? The Wolfpack were merely looking ahead to Week 2, when they would play one of the marquee games nationally against Tennessee only 2 1/2 down the road in Charlotte.

A loss to a strong SEC program isn’t a cause for shame.

But a 51-10 shellacking where the Pack were outplayed, outworked and outcoached in front of a neutral crowd with plenty of Pack fan support?

That’s downright dismal.

“Definitely not what I expected to see from our team,” Doeren told the media after the loss. “If you don’t rush the football well, you don’t control the line of scrimmage, you don’t stop people on 3rd-and-long. It’s hard to win — bottom line. And so you give credit to Tennessee. They played a good football game. They were very physical, but we weren’t good enough tonight.”

The problem with Doeren’s teams, though, is that they are almost never good enough on the sport’s brightest stages.

That’s troubling, especially in the more egalitarian universe of college football ushered in by NIL and the expansion of the College Football Playoff from 4 to 12 teams.

If Doeren were winning 10 games on occasion — or even say once in the past 11 seasons — you might make a compelling argument such as “If NC State keeps Doeren, they’ll eventually find their way into the Playoff from time to time.”

In fairness, Chuck Amato is the only coach in program history who won double-digit games in a season — and he only did it once. But banking on a 9-win season in the ACC to earn you a Playoff berth is about as bad a bet as banking on Doeren in a big game.

Doeren insisted this week that his team is “better than we showed” against Tennessee.

And it is true that NC State is 1 of just 5 Power 4 programs that has won 8 or more games each of the past 4 seasons (2020-2023)— a list that includes Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Notre Dame.

It’s also true that the other 4 programs reached the next logical steps in that time frame — at least 10 wins and a College Football Playoff appearance.

Claim NC State can’t do any better all you want, but at least be intellectually honest about what that claim means. It means you think that a football-crazy fan base with outstanding NIL, a terrific home recruiting base, and the best homefield advantage outside of Death Valley in the ACC can’t do better than 9 wins a season even though other revenue sports at NC State have recently won ACC championships and advanced to the Final Four and College World Series.

After watching Kevin Keatts win the ACC Tournament and take NC State to the Final Four in Year 7, watching Wes Moore’s women’s program become a second weekend fixture over 11 years with a Final Four appearance this spring, and watching Elliott Avent’s masterclass in consistency help the OmaPack to 6 College World Series berths in the past 20 years, the suggestion NC State “can’t do better” in football doesn’t just make little sense — it flies in the face of the facts.

Has Doeren done a nice job in Raleigh establishing a culture of consistency? Absolutely. But Saturday’s flop to Rocky Top was the latest evidence that whatever good Doeren has done is limited by his long-established ceiling.

A fresh voice is needed in Raleigh, where 8 wins is the norm but too often, so are humiliating defeats.

NC State can do better. They just have to believe that’s the case.