Manny Diaz isn’t just walking into Carter-Finley Stadium this week with a game plan. He’s walking in with a sense that something bigger is shifting around college football.
The Duke coach said Dave Doeren’s firing at N.C. State after seven games, in his 14th season with the Wolfpack, hit him hard.
“I know how much NC State meant to him and how much he poured into that place,” Diaz said after the firing. “Fourteen years is an awfully long time in this profession.
You have to wonder if we’ll ever see something like that again. It’s kind of a bygone era now for a lot of reasons.”
Diaz sees Doeren’s exit as part of a larger trend that has taken hold across the sport: coaches getting pushed out in the middle of seasons when expectations spike and patience disappears. Florida State fired Mike Norvell last Sunday. Maryland and Baylor have also made changes, and Diaz thinks more could still come before the year is over.
He doesn’t like what that says about the sport.
“You hate to see good people lose their job,” Diaz said. “From my sense, and I think everybody can feel it, there’s like an anger in college ball now. There are a lot of people who are upset all the time.
“Listen, everybody is investing more, and that’s all part of it. And everybody can’t win, right? Somebody has to lose.”
The money flowing into college football is changing the pressure cooker, Diaz said. Coaches are still paid well, but the expectations have climbed with the spending. Programs are raising more NIL dollars, and the sport is starting to look more and more like the NFL, with general managers helping manage rosters and budgets.
Diaz pointed to the scale of the investment at places like Texas, Oregon, LSU and Ohio State, where an estimated $50 million is being spent this year. In his view, that kind of arms race leaves little room for patience.
He also said college football lacks the mechanisms that help the NFL reset quickly. The pro game has the draft, salary cap and free agency. College football doesn’t.
“Use the picks wisely and a team can quickly improve,” Diaz said. “In pro sports, there’s always hope.
In college, it’s harder to see the hope. That’s a fundamental problem.”
He added, “In some ways you can at least know it’s a fair fight,” before warning that the gap between the sport’s haves and have-nots keeps widening.
“With competitive balance, you can see the signs, and I think there’s a tsunami coming that nobody’s really paying attention to that can really harm the game,” Diaz said.
For Duke, though, the focus shifts back to the field. The Blue Devils head to Raleigh to face an N.C. State team coming off a 31-10 win over Cal, a game in which the Wolfpack shut down the Bears in the second half.
Diaz said the staff has studied what changed under the interim setup, but he doesn’t expect a total makeover.
“When a team is two months into a season their identity is pretty much formed. It’s hard to make a giant course correction. You try to glean what you can out of the Cal game.”
Duke has spent the past two years preparing for Wolfpack quarterback C.J. Bailey, and the Blue Devils believe they know what he does well. Duke defensive coordinator Jonathan Patke said Bailey is the kind of quarterback who can extend plays and stay out of trouble.
“They’ve got weapons and the quarterback knows where to go with the ball,” Patke said. “He’s smart. He’s played a lot of football and he can get out of a lot of trouble.”
The Pack may also have running back Duke Scott back this week after an injury absence, which would give N.C. State another piece to work with.
The Blue Devils have had the upper hand in the series lately, winning the last three meetings and five of the last six. That includes a 45-33 win last season and a 29-19 victory in their most recent trip to Raleigh in 2024.
Diaz said the matchup has delivered plenty of drama in recent years.
“The games have been very exciting the past few years,” Diaz said. “It’s always one of the best places to go in our conference to play a game.”
Duke enters at 6-2 overall and 3-2 in the ACC, while N.C. State is 4-4 and 2-3 in the league.
The Blue Devils are 4.5-point favorites, with the over/under set at 51.5 and the money line at Duke -188 and N.C. State +158.
The teams meet Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh. The game will air on The CW and stream on Fubo, YouTube TV, DIRECTV and the ESPN app.
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