Why Wouldn’t NC State Hire Philip Rivers?

One imagines Philip Rivers in his fortress of solitude, away from his platoon of children and contemplating what to do with his winter now that his St. Michael Catholic High School team has been knocked out of the Alabama high school playoffs. Then it hit him: Well, if the Chargers won’t ask me to replace Justin Herbert before he gets killed, maybe I’ll just go coach North Carolina State.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way, because the former quarterback’s name has been the one most linked with the Raleigh job since Dave Doeren got tagged and bagged in late October. The possibility of him stepping into the gig was the principal discussion point in Rivers’s postgame presser after St. Michael lost to Glenwood School on Friday night. It had been considered the faitest of accompli for weeks, in fact, and Rivers had already been elevated to First Candidate In Training when his son Gunner (of course that is his name), who had been Rivers’s quarterback at St. Mike’s, committed to NC State.

The presumption here is that Rivers’s prosciutto-thin coaching résumé—in mentioning his six seasons at St. Mike, we have covered all of it—has been trumped by his ability to pry open donor pockets and make the Wolfpack relevant again in the bloated ACC. And when we say “again,” we mean “as a big spender in a landscape where ‘big’ is $40 million a year rather than $20 million.” Doeren made a point of describing the limitations that such a barebones budget played on the school’s chances of being noticed, and the school responded with a simple, You’re absolutely right about that, Dave-O. Now get out.