Blame Canada? A Look at Dave Doeren's Tenure So Far at NC State

Things ARE trending in the right direction, and jettisoning the offensive coordinator just doesn't make any sense based on the numbers.

Originally this piece was meant to be a retrospective of the first three years of the Dave Doeren era at NC State, but with the recent dismissal of offensive coordinator Matt Canada, the bent here will focus a little more on the recent-versus-historical performance of the offensive and defensive units as well as the overall direction of the program. The numbers seem to bear witness to the general message board sentiment that the wrong coordinator was shown the door.

Before we plumb the depths of clown blogging analysis, let us introduce our metricians. The F/+ rating comes from the indexes of Football Outsiders' nerds Brian Fremeau (the FEI developer) and Bill Connelly (of S&P fame). Fremeau, or at least his numbers, seemed to have somewhat of a TOB hard on, while Connelly has been much kinder to Doeren, at least overall. Without actually taking two seconds to try to figure out why (this is clown blogging, after all), one would assume that successfully matriculating the ball down the field via the run game is weighted more favorably in Connelly's metrics. Regardless, taking the temperature of their combined rankings, especially since both factor in things like strength of schedule and filter out garbage time, is a good measure of the relative health of one's program. Looking at the rankings of specific units of course gives us even more insight.

Here's them there fancy bullshit numbers:

Year	Record	Conf Rec	F/+	FEI Overall	S&P Overall	FEI O	FEI D	S&P O	S&P D
2010	9-4	5-3	22nd	13th	34th	25th	11th	54th	26th
2011	8-5	4-4	74th	50th	87th	58th	25th	100th	61st
2012	7-6	4-4	68th	59th	76th	78th	42nd	62nd	54th
2013	3-9	0-8	93rd	98th	78th	103rd	80th	92nd	70th
2014	8-5	3-5	55th	60th	50th	21st	86th	43rd	64th
2015	7-6	3-5	48th	*52nd	35th	*18th	*78th	32nd	45th

*not updated after bowl season

There are still some folks that argue that TOB was turned loose too soon, but the numbers hardly support that conclusion. O'Brien was nationally relevant exactly once in his tenure at NC State, his high-water mark coming in 2010 during Russell Wilson's junior campaign. Though the chart does not belabor history through his entire time on the sidelines, the Wolfpack was not a top 50 F/+ program in any other year during his tenure. You can look it up. The TOB years above are chosen to show the precipitous decline in the program's fortunes post-Wilson and to show that, despite not exactly killing it in the penultimate W-L department, the program is in better shape now than it was at any time other than all-pro NFL Super Bowl champ Wilson's standout 2010 campaign.

Bottom line: CDD's second year was better than all of TOB's years save for one, and, despite regressing in the W-L column by a game, CDD's third season was better than his second (and thus also better than all of TOB's years save for one).

Here's the rub: As the metrics show pretty decisively, CDD's improvement of the program has come on the offensive side of the football. Fremeau rates the last two Canada offenses ahead of the best offense of the TOB era. Connelly does the same. While Connelly is lukewarm on the Pack D, Fremeau (who hasn't bothered to update the individual units, only the F/+ overall, during bowl season) puts a big old frowny face on Dave Huxtable's unit. It's probably safe to say that Huxtable's defense will finish in the 80s for a third straight year once the rankings are updated. The NC State defense isn't just bad; it's not showing any appreciable improvement. But, despite the Swiss cheese approach, the offense's grand improvement still propels the program past the mediocre TOB standard.

The loss to a very good Mississippi State team (16^th in F/+) likely would not have damaged the Pack's F/+ standing had it not been so lopsided. The season-ending beat down dropped the Pack seven spots in the overall rankings and, coupled with the ugly business against UNC, certainly makes it feel like this is a program in stagnation. But that stagnation did not come on offense, and whatever slight gains were made this year if we peel away the emotion long enough to seem them, were made by an offense that was hamstrung most of the year by the loss of its two top running backs. With Shadrach Thornton and Matt Dayes all year, this is no doubt a much more formidable offense, and it was pretty solid anyway. I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, and I was certainly perplexed by the lack of touches for Jaylen Samuels and David Grinnage at times during the season, but it is hard to figure why Matt Canada took the fall.

With a new starter at quarterback next year and a much tougher schedule, it seems very likely that history will not judge this decision kindly. If NC State takes a huge step backwards offensively next year, coupled with yet another inept Huxtable defense, the decision to scapegoat Canada may be Doeren's first step out the door. I personally believe Doeren deserves a fifth year regardless of what happens in 2016, but if Canada wasn't safe, I'm not sure the head man can survive anything less than bowl eligibility.

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