NC State football head coach Dave Doeren joined the Packer & Durham show on the ACC Network Thursday morning to discuss fall camp in Raleigh and the 2020 season ahead.

The Wolfpack coach talked about the unfamiliar opponents the team will face from the Coastal Division, how it feels to get back on the field, and the hire of new special assistant to the head coach, Ruffin McNeill.

Here are the highlights from Doeren's appearance:

You're set to play all seven Coastal teams and avoid Clemson, Notre Dame and Louisville this season. How do you like your schedule?

"I liked it, we get to play a bunch of teams that we haven't played in a long time. Being in the rotation we're in, every seven years we'll play one team from the other side aside from UNC.

"This would have been the second time in my eight years that we played Duke, which is right down the road so it's kind of hard for our players. 67-70% of our roster is North Carolina kids and a lot of them will go through their career and never play Duke, never play Virginia, never play Virginia Tech and so we get to do all that this year.

"I thought that was great just for our roster to be able to have that kind of balance, with the ACC schedule."

What was the [head coach's] discussion like when it was first broached to you guys in the offseason about no divisions?

"It was a pretty hot topic when I first got in the league, but for whatever reason, it doesn't go very long anymore. I don't know if people are just at the point where they don't think anything's gonna change but I think there's a lot of coaches in the Atlantic that would like to see a different lineup just from a balance standpoint.

"You look at the end of the year records and you see teams with nine or 10 wins that aren't going to the championship game and teams with seven that are from the other side. There's frustration in that, but there was a time when teams on the Coastal side were knocking off teams in the Atlantic side more frequently.

"Obviously, with the success Clemson and Florida State had when I first got in the league, it's kind of been their deal. I think that first year, Clemson, Florida State and Louisville were all 10 or 11 win teams.

"There's been a lot of that conversation, but there hasn't really been any movement in it. For me, it's more about balance. I just want to see the opportunity to play more teams on our schedule from the other side of the division. Whether we're rearranging it or not, I don't really care about that, I would just like to have more variety.

"Like I said, to recruit a guy that's got teams within a drivable distance and never play them in his career, I just don't think that's right."

What's it been like getting everybody back on the field again?

"It's been a lot of fun. This is a group that worked really hard, pre-COVID quarantining, on team chemistry. We did a lot of things leadership.

"A lot of guys were motivated and angry, I guess you'd say, about last season that wanted to do something about it. We had really two and a half months of a lot of positivity going on around here and when we left, I felt like the things that we did to build our team chemistry really carried us through that period.

"Now they're back and they were, for a long time, wondering, "Are we going to play, are we going to play?" The schedule dropped and then you saw what happened on the west coast and now the SEC comes out with their schedule which points us in a positive direction again I think.

"There's a lot of excitement here, these guys are fun to work with, they're motivated, we've got good competition in depth right now and it's a fun staff to work with too. We're having a lot of fun in Raleigh right now."

I want to ask you a little bit about the running back situation because I thought you had two really emerging guys at that position a year ago with [Zonovan] Bam Knight and Jordan Houston. What's the response to their next season of college football been like?

"They both have gained weight, they look good. Both of them have gained at least 10 pounds since last fall and look really good in practice, they're both working on different things.

"Jordan is seeing things really well, very patient and explosive at the same time.

"Bam, his biggest thing was his ball security a year ago. He wanted to get better and he's so far done a nice job with that.

"Both of them have very good skill sets, in and out of the backfield, they're tough. I think [running backs coach] Kurt Roper has done a really good job in that room developing a mindset of a punishing runner, not just an athletic guy back there. There's a lot of physicality, a lot of competition.

"Ricky Person is in there, Delbert Mimms had a great practice yesterday. There's a lot of competition and depth. The demeanor of that room is what's probably been most impressive so far."

Can you talk about why the Ruffin McNeill hire made sense for you, the staff and the timing?

"The timing was just kind of how it worked out because of COVID. When I came back, I had a lot of time over the winter break to reflect on my season, our staff, our players and just all the things that go into it. I asked [director of athletics] Boo [Corrigan] if there was a way that I could hire a former head coach.

"A couple of years back I had [former Duke head coach] Ted Roof here on our staff and it was nice for me to have somebody in the building when I had decisions to make that had been in my chair that I could just bounce ideas off of. Ted and I had a lot of conversations that year that were helpful to me, and no one else could have given me that insight because they didn't have the same chair that I had.

"One of our ADs, Fred Demarest, had been at Florida and Billy Donovan had done a similar thing. It really helped him out professionally when he was there.

So they allowed me to start interviewing guys for that spot and I didn't think Ruffin would be a candidate, to be honest. It just kind of worked out. All of a sudden I saw he was coming home to be around his dad and so I called him to make sure his dad was okay and that he was okay.

"Once we started talking about what his life was going to be in North Carolina, I brought up the position and thought let's have a conversation, see if it works out. And it did. I knew that there was nothing I could do officially until after July 1 because of the timing of all the things we were dealing with on campus.

"It's been phenomenal to have Ruff here, he's such a good man and he knows everybody in the state. He and I have known each other 22 years, so to have a trusted friend in house that I can bounce ideas off of, it's been awesome."

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