The Wolfpacker has been enumerating its choices for the top 10 stories of the past decade that was in NC State athletics.
Related links:
No. 10 - The hiring of Kevin Keatts
No. 9 - Winning the rivalry in football
No. 8 - The renovation of Reynolds
No. 7 – The rise of women’s hoops
No. 6 – The 2014 class leads football
No. 5 - The rise of the non-revenues
No. 4 – Rise and fall of Mark Gottfried
No. 3 – The College World Series
No. 2 – Russell Wilson and QBU
The countdown concludes with No. 1:
No. 1: The Reign Of Debbie Yow
There’s a reason why one of the most well-read stories of the decade on the Wolfpacker website dealt with the legacy of former NC State director of athletics Debbie Yow.
As we noted in that column, “the lasting legacy [of Yow] could be bringing the Wolfpack into the 21st century of college athletics.”
Yow was hired in the summer of 2010, replacing the fired Lee Fowler. The year before Yow arrived, NC State was 89th in the Learfield Directors’ Cup, which ranks the teams based on overall department-wide athletics success. That was in the bottom five of all Power Five programs.
There was also money issues. NC State had one of the lowest-revenue departments in the Power Five ranks.
Ten years later and it’s night-and-day different.
Off the field, Yow worked a significant apparel deal with Adidas and a lucrative new multimedia rights deal with Learfield Sports that were both much closer to market value than the previous arrangement.
But it was on the field where NC State was revitalized. Our No. 7 (rise of women’s hoops) and No. 5 (rise of non-revenues) stories of the decade could be attributed to the choices of Yow, who hired a slate of coaches at NC State that is, across the board, clearly the best that the university has seen since Willis Casey was running the department in the 1970s into the 80s.
The result is NC State went from a laughingstock in terms of athletic competitiveness to being one of the top 25 programs in the country in a span of 10 years. In 2019, NC State was No. 26 in the Learfield Directors’ Cup. The year before, it finished a program-best 15th in the country and fourth in the ACC.
When Boo Corrigan was hired in January to replace Yow, he inherited a department that was in a far better place, more than words can probably described, than what Yow walked into at the beginning of the decade.
There may have been other stories more prominent nationally regarding NC State, but for Wolfpack nation the overdue overhaul of athletics orchestrated by Yow will be the lasting memory.
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