Taking the Temperature of the Wolfpack Football Program

With chaos in the coaching ranks of college football occurring every week, every program and head coach dealing with adversity is having to answer the same questions about direction, job security, and the future. NC State head coach Dave Doeren is no exception.

The Wolfpack, losers of four of the last five games, finds itself dealing with tremendous adversity on the injury front and can't seem to play a complete game. While the issues are numerous, Doeren finds himself receiving the majority of the flak for some things beyond his control.

On this episode of the NC State Insider Podcast, host and lead beat writer Tucker Sennett addresses the temperature of the program and, once again, the noise around NC State football in 2025.

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Doeren spoke to members of the media at his weekly press conference Monday and confronted some of the noise regarding his job directly. Find out what the head coach had to say below:

Doeren Transcript

From Doeren's opening statement

"We're a team that, like I said after the game to the guys, it's a fun team to coach, and these are good kids that want to play well. They work hard. There's great chemistry. Nobody's given up. We just got to play better, you know?"

"And it starts with me. I told them this: what we see on film, what we put on film, is our resume. It's your head coach's resume, it's your assistant coaches' resumes and it's your resume, and collectively, we all have to do better. And it's just executing."

On some of the Wolfpack's offensive woes

"And when you have penalties at inopportune moments, or you have a pass, whether it's dropped or whether it's an overthrow or a miss, where you have a guy bust on defense in a call that we've practiced over and over and over, I consider those kind of things layups and as a football team, you got to make your layups."

"To put it in basketball terminology, you make your layups, you have a high percentage on your free throws and every now and then, you hit a step back three. And that's what we got to do. We got to go up and make some big catches when they're there, make some great throws when they're there. And then the easy things, we got to do them like it's routine."

On what's gone wrong for NC State's defense throughout the year

"Defensively, it's been a really tough year and I've talked about this before. You know, we've had nine different guys on defense get injured throughout the season that were in our top 22 and so when you have movement in your depth chart to injuries, not from competition, there's some lost learning and that's taking place."

"As a football team, you want to get better and better and better. And for us, there's been three different safeties, three different nickels, two linebackers with Sean (Brown) and AJ (Richardson) being out. So there's just been a lot of movement and moving parts and guys changing positions that haven't allowed that transformation, that progression that you have week in and week out."

Want more NC State football content during the 2025 season? Follow on X (Twitter) @WolfpackOnSI and @SennettTucker and never miss another episode of the NC State Insider Podcast. Want to reach out with questions about the Wolfpack? Send an email to wolfpackonsi@gmail.com to potentially be featured on mailbag stories in the future.

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