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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 7, 2018

Dave Doeren

Greensboro, North Carolina

DAVE DOEREN: Excited for our home game here tomorrow night against Wake Forest, a game that we selected for our military appreciation night, which is a big deal here to our university, to me personally, and to our football team, and excited to share the evening with the active military and retired military personnel that will be here. And on top of that, it's a night for our seniors to have their last home ACC game against an in-state football team who's very potent on offense and does a lot of really good things schematically with a lot of veteran players. And on defense, again, you see a bunch of guys that have played for them. They do a lot of different things schematically, and you see some guys that are disruptive. They chase the ball. They play hard. And so great opportunity for us to play an in-state game here against a team that has always given us a great game, and look forward to the opportunity to play against them.

Q. You guys still have a chance to finish with a 10-win season, which would be the first in quite a while there. I'm wondering if that's something that even gets talked about among you guys or if that's something to think about once the regular season ends.
DAVE DOEREN: You know, I think it's talked about in our locker room probably more than it is with me. We try to keep things mainstream with the game we're playing and know that we're not going to win 10 if we don't win the next one. Everything is about staying undefeated at home. That's the biggest thing we've been talking about with our team, and that's something that was a team goal of ours when we started training camp, and Wake Forest is the next team in the way to keep that relevant for our guys.

But the beginning of every year your team always talks about the end-of-the-year goals, and obviously being better than last year's team is one of them. This is the next step in doing that.

Q. A lot of coaches talk about that double-digit mark, 10, 11, 12, and how --
DAVE DOEREN: Right.

Q. -- important that is just in building a program. So I want to ask you that; how important is it to get to double digits to show just the growth and where you are right now as a program?
DAVE DOEREN: I think any time you finish ahead of where you finished the year before, particularly when the last year for us was the best one we've had since I've been here, you're showing progress, and you're building a program and then you're trying to maintain a level of excellence and improve. Getting to 10 wins for us is kind of that benchmark because we've had nine, and so I think every senior class that I've ever coached wants to leave their legacy, and for this group right here, being undefeated at home, it hasn't been done in 32 years. Being better than last year's team, which would put us at 10 wins or more, those are two things that are important to them.

But the process of getting there can't be thinking about the end. It's got to be thinking about how to get there, and that's kind of -- you come in our building, we don't have our schedule on the wall, we have the next team we play, and that's it.

Q. How important was what you saw out of your team last weekend, being able to bounce back after the previous couple of weeks?
DAVE DOEREN: Yeah, it's very important. You know, and I thought our guys played really well at Syracuse in a lot of ways and gave ourselves a chance to win that football game. I don't feel like we didn't bounce back from Clemson. We just didn't win the game. They're a really good team, and we had a chance to win the game. So getting back in the win column obviously makes everybody feel better, there's no doubt, but I thought our guys bounced back from our loss at Clemson and put together a really good week of prep for Syracuse and didn't get it done, and again, Florida State we played much better. We won the turnover margin, and we didn't do that at Syracuse, and that's -- for me, we're undefeated this season when we're even or better in turnover margin, and I think in my tenure at NC State we're 25-7 when that happens. That's a pretty big deal when you get that part of the game won.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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