The last time head coach Dave Doeren and the NC State football team played at Kenan Stadium, the stakes could not have been higher. In Doeren’s fourth year leading the program, the Wolfpack came into that game with a 5-6 record, needing a win to reach a bowl game. It did exactly that, beating a strong Tar Heels team 28-21.
That victory saved the Pack’s postseason appearance streak from being snapped at two years, and, depending on who you ask, saved Doeren’s job. Count him as one of the people that will tell you that.
“I’d say it was [a turning point],” Doeren said at his weekly news conference Monday. “It probably saved my job, winning that game. I wouldn’t be standing here today, probably, had we not won that game.”
The win over the Tar Heels, which clinched a spot in the Camping World Independence Bowl for the Pack, capped off a rollercoaster of a regular season. The Wolfpack beat Notre Dame in a hurricane, lost games it had no business losing to against bad East Carolina and Boston College teams and dropped close, heartbreaking games against heavyweights Clemson and Florida State.
The importance of finishing that off with the UNC win can’t be overstated. The Wolfpack kept its head coach, and had momentum going into the following year coming off a 41-17 win over Vanderbilt in the bowl game.
“Since then, obviously that was our recruiting class that had all these guys drafted the following year,” Doeren said. “For those guys to stick together and go through what we did that month – because that was a crazy season coming off the Clemson game, and then we just lost some games in the last seconds – guys stuck together and got on a run at the end of that season, and then had a good bowl win against an SEC team.”
That allowed a team laden with NFL talent to finish the next year 9-4 and 6-2 in the ACC, its best conference mark since 1994. That 2017 team saw a school-record seven players drafted into the NFL, which contributed to the signing of back-to-back, top-26 recruiting classes.
With wins in its last two games this season, NC State would finish 9-3 in the regular season, with a chance at its first 10-win year since 2002.
That game proved to be a turning point for both teams, as the Tar Heels, by the way, have taken a stunning nosedive over the past two years. UNC went 3-9 last season, and comes into Saturday’s game with a 2-8 record. While a lot has gone into the program’s collapse, the Heels have simply not been the same since that 2016 contest.
Now, it hasn’t all been perfect for NC State since then. Last year’s team could have finished better if not for mistake-filled losses to South Carolina and Wake Forest, and this year’s home defeat at the hands of the Demon Deacons was simply unacceptable.
However, there’s no denying the growth of the program in that span. A team that scratched and clawed into a bowl game two years ago has seen its win total (likely) increase two years in a row, and continued to win big on the recruiting trail.
It’s crazy to think about what one game can change, and how none of that might have happened without that rivalry week win in 2016. Without that victory, NC State might have been starting over from scratch with a new head coach at the start of last year.
A strong argument can be made that beating the Tar Heels at Kenan Stadium for the second time in his tenure was the most pivotal win of Doeren’s NC State career, and allowed everything that followed to happen.
“I think our momentum changed after that win in our program for sure,” Doeren said.
