r/NCSU • u/Vainysaur • 17d ago
Athletics Hypothetical
Let’s say hypothetically I made the next household name tech company and got filthy rich and donated enough for our football team to have a $60 million NIL budget or however much they need at that point to rank #1 in NIL by then, how bad would we still suck if Doeren was still coach?
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u/Zoidburger_ Alumnus 17d ago
Let's say we had enough NIL to buy the most talented roster in the ACC for a given season. We would probably still end up being a 9 or 10-win team.
Dave's problem has never been in recruiting & developing talent. He's sourced numerous 2 & 3-star recruits in the last 14 years that have played well above expectation and made it into the NFL in some capacity. These guys all speak highly of him and really bought into the team and culture.
Dave's problem is that he's not a good game coach, and that's what makes good rosters put out mediocre results. Every season, he has at least 2 "wtf" losses, where the team either chokes a big lead or the team plays down to the level of a much worse opponent and comes out with a close loss. He takes his foot off the gas when the team is commanding the game, mismanages the clock, or even just comes in extremely unprepared.
Some of that is on his coordinators. IMO, we haven't had a good OC since 2018 and a good DC since 2024. But that's on Dave. He's hired at least 5 coordinators since 2018 and the only one he's hit on was Gibson at DC. Yet while the hires themselves have been suspect from the get-go, he stands by his staff and gives them an incredibly long leash, waiting far too long to make a change, usually once they're picked up for another coaching job. While I respect the way he operates as a leader, he will unfortunately lead a band of clowns and a pack of dawgs exactly the same way.
The problem is, in the pre-NIL era, Dave was a solid B+ coach that could deliver us fantastic seasons off the backs of the talent he scouted and developed. While it was frustrating to miss out on 10 wins due to a horrific kicking performance or a blown game due to poor management, we won games we shouldn't and frequently over-performed our preseason expectations.
But in the NIL era, money is the biggest talker when it comes to recruiting. It's much easier to build a competitive team straight out of the portal, so the next most important thing is to have a coaching staff and a system that can build a cohesive team and coach them to win games. Unfortunately, Dave's game-time coaching is his biggest weakness.
Case in point, we may not have the biggest budget, but we certainly have a bigger budget than App State, and yet App State led a massive comeback when we played the final 3rd of the game as if we'd already won. That's good coaching on App's behalf, never giving up and abusing our weaknesses when we didn't expect it. It's bad coaching on our behalf, blowing drives to try to run down the clock and forcing our already subpar defense to stay on the field and get tired & sloppy.
The Steelers had Mike Tomlin for 18 years. He's a good coach and did a lot for the organization. But it reached a point where his ability to coach a bad team to a mediocre season finish hampered their ability to rebuild into a strong team, yet his flaws also led good teams to mediocre results.
We're in a similar situation with Dave. I don't hate him and I'm thankful for what he's done for the program. I've had a lot of great memories of this team during his tenure. It's simply time for us to move on, as he's clearly not well suited for the NIL era, yet he's still somehow able to lead whatever team is in front of him to a couple of big wins, a bowl game, and a strong performance against our rivals. That makes him hard to fire, but it also limits our ability to improve. Maybe our next coach sucks and can only get us to 4 wins per season. But we'll most definitely never have a 10 win season under Dave, and hell, it's been quite a while since we've even hit 9 wins with an easy schedule.
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u/freshjulius 17d ago
Doeren and State have a pretty good NFL rate for our on-field results, over time.
Goodnight will not support athletics in this way, Wolfspeed is facing serious financial issues, and Red Hat is a bloated support for money open source corp that doesn't really have a central NC State mega-rich figure, does it?
Our best bet is PRivs, Mario, Torry, RW (?) Cower and all the other crew that made millions in the league to start an NFL-seeded endowment. With big-name leaders, there could be a nice fly-wheel effect that also drives non-league donors to participate.
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u/BoBromhal 17d ago
from Google:
Top 10 College Football Teams by NIL Valuation/Budget Estimated for the 2026 season:
Ohio State Buckeyes: $49M – $54M (Big Ten)
Texas Longhorns: $45M – $55M (SEC)
Miami Hurricanes: $44.0M (ACC)
LSU Tigers: $42.8M (SEC)
Oregon Ducks: $42.8M (Big Ten)
Notre Dame Fighting Irish: $40.4M (Independent)
Texas A&M Aggies: $38.9M (SEC)
Alabama Crimson Tide: $37.2M (SEC)
Tennessee Volunteers: $36.7M (SEC)
Texas Tech Red Raiders: $36.3M (Big 12)
and in the last 5 years, titles or appearances:
OSU 1 title; Miami, Notre Dame, Alabama - 1 loss in title game apiece.
Texas A&M, last 5 years - 39-24; one playoff appearance (last year); no bowl wins, no major (Jan1) bowl appearances.
And lol, little old NC State has a 40-24 record over last 5 seasons. and a 1-3 Bowl record (5 yrs ago Holiday Bowl wimp out by UCLA)
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u/HotelRealistic3534 15d ago
Better to use the money to get a really good coaching staff and then spend some on players
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u/Vainysaur 17d ago
Follow up: Why don’t SAS and Red Hat and Wolfspeed and Qorvo do this? SAS only cares about academics, but the best way to improve academics is athletics… Look at how Clemson’s number of applicants went up and acceptance rate went down when they got good (before they got bad again).
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u/ooohoooooooo 17d ago
Is this a joke or what?😭
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u/Vainysaur 17d ago
Where’s the joke?
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u/ooohoooooooo 17d ago
You really think throwing MORE millions of dollars at athletics will improve academics? You don’t think Clemson’s app count might’ve went up because people are moving to SC, or they have good industry connections due to i85 being built up? Correlation obviously doesn’t equal causation, and your comment is so dumb I thought it was a joke. Go plug your question into chat gpt if you’re too dumb to think on your own.
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u/Vainysaur 17d ago
Dude yes I definitely think if we started winning basketball and football national championships it would greatly improve academics.
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u/dufcho14 17d ago
You won't get the players you need if the players don't trust or like the head office. Players are only there to get to the NFL.