Fired coach Dave Doeren leaves NC State 'with no grudges' - ESPN

RALEIGH, N.C. — These are unusual days for former N.C. State coach Dave Doeren.

He isn't sure exactly what comes next after he was fired over the weekend midway through his 14th season. It brought an abrupt end to a tenure that saw him become the program's all-time winningest coach, yet be unable to make a breakthrough leap to higher success.

And that has completely changed the football-centric routines of fall that Doeren has followed since he started playing football in the fourth grade.

«I've coached 32 years, and I've never been unemployed,» Doeren said Tuesday, appearing via virtual news conference to make his first comments since the firing but declining to take questions from reporters.

«So these last few days in October, waking up with an empty calendar, with no alarm clock has been very different — to wake up on a Monday morning and not be thinking about the next game or the last game or what's going on, never in my life.»

Doeren said he was excited to spend «some downtime with some damn good people» of friends and family.

«Sara and I will be cheering for N.C. State forever,» Doeren said of his wife. «I leave here with no grudges. I completely love this place, and we want to see this program shock the world.

»I might be in the mountains somewhere, sitting in a river fishing or at the lake. But I'll always be cheering for the Wolfpack, I promise you that."

Doeren, 54, had a 98-74 record with the Wolfpack and became the program's winningest coach with a 2023 victory over Miami. He entered this year as the fourth-longest-tenured coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision and second in the ACC behind Clemson's Dabo Swinney, and his teams had regularly won eight or nine games while consistently beating top rival North