5/26/2020 football Edit

Dave Doeren talks upcoming season for NC State

Matt Carter • TheWolfpackCentral

Editor

During a video interview with The Charlotte Observer’s prep sports coverage team, NC State football head coach Dave Doeren expressed his hope that players might be back on campus by the start of the second session of summer school, which is June 22.

The NCAA has permitted schools to begin allowing athletes to return on a voluntary basis on June 1, but the ACC is leaving it up to individual schools to announce when they would bring players back. NC State has not made any announcement yet on its plans.

Regardless of when NC State’s players return, Doeren was optimistic that the Pack will be on the field at some point and in some form this year to play football.

NC State Wolfpack football head coach Dave Doeren is confident there will be a season this year. — Doeren is confident that there will be a season this year. (Rob Kinnan-USA TODAY Sports)

“I think we’re definitely going to play football,” Doeren said. “Don’t know if we’re going to start on time or not. Don’t know how many games, but I do know that college athletics needs college football for a variety of reasons.”

Doeren added it could be good for the country as well, noting that the charity golf match between Tiger Woods/Peyton Manning and Phil Mickelson/Tom Brady averaged almost 6 million viewers during its telecast Sunday.

“Just seeing how things are trending, I would say we are on a good track now to have the games,” Doeren said. “I just don’t know what the stands are going to be like. I have no idea how that’s going to play out.”

Equally confident is Doeren about NC State’s chances for a bounce-back season after an injury-riddled 4-8 campaign in 2019.

“I do like the opportunity we have to win a lot more games than we did last year,” he said.

Part of that is because of the baptism by fire gained by younger players who Doeren noted “all had a lot of experience probably before they should have had it.”

“What you have now is that group of young guys. They got tested, battle-tested really, thrown into the fire, and then a bunch of veteran players that had to sit out and watch what went down last year and have a lot of fire in their bellies,” Doeren said.

There were a lot of changes made in the offseason, notably five new assistant coaches. Doeren noted that making such moves are always difficult given the respect he has for all of his former coaches.

However, last season offered an opportunity for Doeren to take a full examination of his program.

“Going through what we did last year was very difficult on our staff, on our players, on our fans,” Doeren noted. “None of us want to live it again. Some of it was out of our control, some of it wasn’t. I think I always look at myself first, then my staff and then our team.

“It was a great offseason. I thought it brought a lot of ugly things to head. That was one of the positive things of going through adversity. It really does uncover some things that had you won this game or that game and gone to a bowl, you might have overlooked it. For me it’s a great chance to really look at what’s going on.

“Our players did a phenomenal job learning their part of it. Together we worked really hard on building some chemistry this winter that I thought helped us quite a bit going through the quarantine.”

It will be a quick test for Doeren’s new-look staff. In 100 days from Tuesday, NC State will open at Louisville on a Thursday night game. Then on Sept. 12, Mississippi State from the SEC with new hire Mike Leach at head coach comes to Raleigh.

“We got two great games to open the season,” Doeren acknowledged. “It’s one of those deals, sometimes we don’t play a schedule like that and everyone complains about it. Then you do have one and everyone is worried about it.

“You got to line up and play.”