RALEIGH, N.C. — A duality exists within NC State football. Dave Doeren, in his 14th season as head coach, feels all of it.In the last five years, only three ACC teams have won more games. NC State has won eight or nine games seven times in the last nine seasons.At the same time, NC State hasn’t gotten to double-digit wins. And though it has been ranked at some point in seven of the last nine years, it has never climbed higher than 14th in the College Football Playoff rankings. The program’s trophy case has an empty space, too.“Do we win the conference? No. And nobody is more mad about that than me. I want that bad,” Doeren said.As college football’s landscape continues to shift, Doeren and NC State find themselves in a fascinating quandary. He presides over one of the most consistent programs in the sport. Indisputably a winner, and a sustained winner even in the free-transfer and player-pay era, when consistency has never been more difficult and where NC State has had to be calculated in its spending, watching key players leave for larger programs in the process.However, NC State has also never played for an ACC championship. The Wolfpack are one of just four schools to never play in the conference title game, and the others — Syracuse, Cal and Stanford — are relative newcomers to the conference. It’s spawned frustration from fans clamoring for more.How does Doeren view it?“The silent majority? Or the loud minority?” Doeren asks. “I don’t know, man. I stopped listening to them however many years ago. What we’ve done here, to be consistent in this sport is hard to do.”NC State has won double-digit games exactly once in school history, when Chuck Amato leaned on star quarterback Philip Rivers to win 11 games in 2002. But even that season included a three-game losing streak after a 9-0 start to relegate NC State to fourth in the ACC.It hasn’t won the ACC since 1979.Its chase to add another 10-win season and, perhaps, an ACC title begins with Saturday’s season opener at Virginia, a conference game initially scheduled as a nonconference game in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Unsurprisingly, NC State was picked to finish in the upper middle — seventh — in the 17-team ACC in the preseason media poll.What’s kept the Wolfpack from climbing the mountain?Three things stand out: Money, scheduling and timing.Retaining top-end talent has proven difficult for the Wolfpack. Receiver KC Concepcion left for Texas A&M after the 2024 season, won the Hornung Award, became an All-American and was drafted 24th overall this spring.This offseason, two of the team’s top three receivers — Terrell Anderson and Noah Rogers — left for USC and Alabama, respectively. Running back Hollywood Smothers, who broke out for 939 rushing yards and 37 catches last season, entered the portal as arguably its most coveted running back, initially committing to Alabama before landing at Texas.Receivers coach Joker Phillips said the offers those receivers got were “crazy” and not something NC State wanted to match.But it paid up to hold onto star quarterback CJ Bailey, making him one of the nation’s few three-year starters this fall.“We had to keep our quarterback,” Phillips said. “If I’m a receiver and I’ve got a good quarterback, I’ll take a little less.”Doeren has no interest in talking about the exits of any players no longer on his roster. But it highlights the specific challenge he’s facing. While college football roster spending is somewhat cloudy, Doeren is confident the Wolfpack’s budget for its roster is in the top half of the ACC.“But we’re not in the top four either,” Doeren said. “But the expectation is we should finish in the top four. And that’s the challenge.”NC State isn’t necessarily playing moneyball, but portal season does mean making hard decisions.“If you’ve only got a certain amount of money, you can’t put it all on one position. The exception to that is your quarterback. You gotta make sure you’ve got the right guy there,” Doeren said. “But if you leverage your offensive line to keep three receivers, that’s a bad decision in my opinion. Some schools have unlimited checkbooks and keep signing them. I don’t. So I’ve got to make business decisions sometimes.“We have a good starting 11. And we have a competitive group of guys behind them. But when you go to Notre Dame or Miami, you see the 11 and the 11 behind them, and there isn’t much difference. They’re buying backups that are starters at other places. We don’t have that. We have freshmen and sophomores we’re developing. Some of them are really good players. Some of them aren’t there yet.”Hollywood Smothers had four 100-yard games for NC State last year, but transferred to Texas this offseason. (David Jensen / Getty Images)Then there’s scheduling. Until the ACC dissolved divisions in 2023, NC State was in the Atlantic division with Florida State and Clemson, the two most powerful programs of the 2010s. From 2009 to 2020, either FSU or Clemson won the Atlantic, while all seven members of the Coastal won the division at some point over that span. Doeren’s team finished second in the Atlantic twice.“I was on the stacked side of things for my first seven years here. There was a dominant Florida State with Jimbo (Fisher) and a dominant Clemson with Dabo (Swinney),” Doeren said. “I really thought when they got rid of divisions, that would help us.”On the field, NC State hasn’t been able to match its best offenses with its best defenses. The Wolfpack have only been able to field a top-75 offense and defense in the same season once in the last five years.“It’s been really good defense, average offense. Really good offense, average defense,” offensive line coach Garrett Tujague said. “If we could ever put both of those on the field at the same time, that’s when you’re going to see it.”The last two seasons, NC State’s offense ranked 35th and 46th nationally in yards per play. The defense ranked 112th and 95th.The two previous seasons, the offense ranked 90th and 115th as the defense surged, ranking 53rd and 22nd.The 2021 season featured an offense that ranked 45th and a defense that ranked 16th nationally. The result: NC State was a three-point road loss to Wake Forest away from reaching the ACC title game and finished in the AP top 20 for the first time since 2002.Last season, nine of 11 defensive starters were injured, forcing the Wolfpack to play, at times, four true freshmen in the secondary.“We have a good starting 11. And we have a competitive group of guys behind them. But when you go to Notre Dame or Miami you see the 11 and the 11 behind them and there isn’t much difference,” Doeren said. “They’re buying backups that are starters at other places. We don’t have that. We have freshmen and sophomores we’re developing. Some of them are really good players. Some of them aren’t there yet.”In the future, finishing in the top 20 might be good enough to make the postseason. And NC State’s upper-middle consistency could turn out to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of an expanded postseason.While discussions continue about whether to expand the Playoff from 12 teams, momentum shifted toward a 24-team model this summer, with all major conferences but the SEC on board. This offseason, The Athletic examined what the sport would have looked like if the 24-team Playoff had begun in 2014, the first year of the four-team CFP (and Doeren’s second season in Raleigh).NC State would have qualified five times, the same number as Tennessee and Florida, one more than Auburn, one fewer than Texas and one more than Miami. Only 16 teams would have qualified more often.In an expanded Playoff, reaching the sport’s highest stage would not only seem realistic, but an expectation.Until then, it’s still chasing an opportunity to fill the trophy case with more than bowl wins.“To be in the ACC championship would be a big deal. To me, that’s the goal. I want to win the ACC. That’s what I want to do,” Doeren said. “That’s the goal. That’s the goal since I got here.”