Is Dave Doeren the Best Coach NC State Has Had?

Let's Check the Numbers Instead of Just Going on Emotion

Look, I'm not asking for much. I'm a State fan. I know what program I follow. I don't lie awake dreaming about the CFP, and I've made peace with the fact that. My yardstick for a Wolfpack coach has always been simple, and I think it's a fair one:

Contend for the ACC championship. Not win it every year — contend for it.
Beat more ACC teams than you lose to. You're in the league. Win the league games more than you lose them.
Against the other power conferences, beat the bottom two-thirds. I'm not expecting us to walk into Columbus and leave with a win. But the mediocre-to-bad Power 5 teams? Beat those.

That's it. That's the yardstick. Reasonable, right? So when the "Doeren is the best coach we've had" argument comes up — and it does, a lot, because he's got more wins than anyone in school history — I wanted to actually check it against that yardstick instead of just going with the vibe. I pulled every season, every game log, every conference record for the ACC-era coaches with real sample sizes (Doeren, Dick Sheridan, Chuck Amato), and here's what the numbers say.

The Case Everyone Already Knows

Doeren has been at NC State since 2013. Thirteen full seasons in the books, a 14th underway. In that time he's put up 95 wins, more than any coach in program history, over a career winning percentage of .572. He's taken the Pack to a bowl in 10 of 13 eligible seasons (77%), and in 8 of those 13 years he hit the number I think most of us actually want out of a season — 8 or 9 wins. That's a 62% hit rate on "the yardstick," sustained over more than a decade. Nobody else in the ACC era has done that at that kind of volume. If longevity and just generally not being bad is the argument, Doeren wins going away.

But that's not really my yardstick. My yardstick is about the league and about the teams we're supposed to beat. So let's go there.

Yardstick #1: Contend for the ACC Championship

I'm leaving the ACC Championship Game itself out of this one on purpose, and here's why: the game didn't exist until 2005, so it can't fairly separate Doeren from Sheridan or Amato's early-2000s teams. And in the 20+ years it has existed, NC State has never played in it — not under Amato, not under Tom O'Brien, not under Doeren. Since the number can't tell any of these coaches apart, it's not useful for this argument. One footnote and we move on.

What I can measure is how close he's actually gotten to a division or conference title. Doeren's best finish is 2nd place in the Atlantic Division in 2017 — a really good year, 9-4, finished ranked #23. That's it. That's the ceiling in 13 years. For comparison, Sheridan's very first year (1986) also produced a 2nd-place conference finish, and NC State hasn't won the league outright since Bo Rein in 1979, pre-title-game.

So: has Doeren contended? Once, clearly (2017). A couple other years (2020, 2021, 2023) were good ACC seasons that kept the Pack in the conversation into November. But "contending" as a regular expectation? No — most years, the answer is a fairly clean no.

Yardstick #2: Beat More ACC Teams Than You Lose To

This is the number that actually surprised me the most when I dug into it, and I think it's the single most important stat for this whole conversation. Forget overall record. What's the ACC-only record?

Dick Sheridan (1986-92): ACC record 31-18-1, win% .630, only 1 losing conference season in 7 years
Dave Doeren (2013-25): ACC record 51-55, win% .481, 8 losing-or-.500 conference seasons in 13 years
Chuck Amato (2000-06): ACC record 25-31, win% .446, 5 losing conference seasons in 7 years

Doeren has a losing record in ACC play across his tenure. Fifty-one wins, fifty-five losses. That includes an 0-8 conference season (2013) and a 1-7 conference season (2019), plus three more years at 3-5. Eight of his thirteen seasons — nearly two-thirds — have been at or below .500 against the league he's actually paid to compete in. His gaudy overall win total has been built substantially on the non-conference schedule, not on beating the ACC.

Sheridan, by contrast, had exactly one losing ACC season in seven years (1990, 3-4). That's remarkable consistency against the exact competition this bar is asking about.

By my own stated yardstick — beat more ACC teams than you lose to — Doeren fails it on the career-long average, even though he's cleared it comfortably in four individual seasons (2017, 2020, 2021, 2023).

Yardstick #3: Beat the Bottom Two-Thirds of Other Power Conferences

This is where I wanted to separate "good coach" from "good scheduler." I went through every non-conference game of Doeren's tenure and sorted opponents into two buckets: legitimate Power conference opponents (SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and power-independent Notre Dame) versus Group of 5/FCS opponents.

(Quick side note: the Pac-12 as a conference doesn't really exist anymore — it collapsed down to two schools after the 2023-24 realignment wave and has been rebuilding since, with most of its old membership now scattered across the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC. I'm using it here as a label for "who a team belonged to at the time the game was played," since these games span 2013-2025 and conference membership was a moving target the whole way through.)

Group of 5 / FCS (non-conference): 39-3, win% .929
Power 5 (non-conference): 4-12, win% .250

There it is. Against the teams we're supposed to beat, Doeren is nearly automatic — 39-3. Against actual Power conference competition outside the ACC, he's 4-12. That's not "beat the bottom two-thirds," that's losing three out of four. And it's not because he's scheduling playoff contenders — a lot of those 12 losses are to unranked, middling Power 5 teams that a program with real depth and coaching should be handling more than a quarter of the time.

I also wanted to know: does that pattern hold up against ranked teams generally, not just Power 5 non-conference games? Same story, worse.

Sheridan: 12-13 vs. ranked opponents, win% .480
Amato: 6-12 vs. ranked opponents, win% .333
Doeren: 7-27 vs. ranked opponents, win% .206

Sheridan's teams were a coin flip against ranked opponents. Amato won a third of the time. Doeren wins about one in five. Doeren does have real signature wins on his resume — #12 Florida State and #17 Louisville in 2017, #9 Clemson in 2021, #8 Georgia Tech in 2025 — and those matter, they're genuinely great days. But they're the exception, not the pattern, and six of his thirteen seasons have zero wins over a ranked team at all.

One honest complication here: schedule strength doesn't fully explain the gap. Two quick definitions since these numbers do a lot of work in this section: SOS (Strength of Schedule) is a rating of how tough a team's slate was, built from the combined records and quality of everyone they played — zero is roughly average, positive means a tougher-than-average schedule, negative means softer. SRS (Simple Rating System) does something similar but for the team itself, combining point margin with schedule strength into one number that estimates how good a team actually was that year, adjusted for who they played. Positive is above average; higher is better.

With that in mind: Doeren's teams have actually played a slightly tougher average schedule (SOS +1.80) than Sheridan's (+1.24), and a similar one to Amato's (+2.01). So it's not that Doeren ducked competition. The difference shows up in SRS instead — when his teams have faced that competition, they've graded out as less dominant (average SRS 4.17, versus 5.45 for Sheridan and 5.89 for Amato). Same level of test, weaker showing.

So, Where Does That Leave Us?

If the question is "who has the best career?" — Doeren, no contest, by volume. Ninety-five wins, fourteen years, the most bowl trips in program history. That's real and it matters.

But that's not the question I actually asked at the start. I asked: does he clear the yardstick I've always thought was reasonable for a State coach? And running the numbers, the honest answer is mostly no, on the career average — a losing ACC record, one real conference-contending season in thirteen, and a rough record against anyone good, whether that's a ranked team or a mediocre Power 5 opponent he should be beating four times out of four.

What Doeren has done extremely well is exactly what he's been criticized for doing quietly: he doesn't have the bad years that used to define this program before him (three straight 3-8 seasons right before Sheridan arrived, remember), and he's given us more 8-9 win, go-to-a-bowl seasons than anyone in school history. That has real value. It's just a different kind of value than "contend for the ACC," and I think we owe it to ourselves as fans to be honest about which one we're actually getting.

My take, for what it's worth: Doeren has been the most durable coach we've had. Sheridan, in seven years, was the best at doing the specific things I actually want. Different jobs, different eras, different answers — and now, at least, we've got the receipts to talk about it properly.