Replacing Debbie Yow as NC State’s director of athletics was always going to be a tall order for the university, but with the hiring of Boo Corrigan, the future looks just as bright as the past few years for the Pack.
Yow transformed the Wolfpack across the board, making great hire after great hire to make NC State competitive in essentially every sport. The year before she took over, the Pack finished 89th in the Learfield Director’s Cup, which measures the overall athletic success of a program.
For the 2017-18 season, the Wolfpack finished 15th. Halfway through this academic year, the Pack is currently ranked 10th. Yow took an athletic program that was mediocre for a Power 5 school and made it a national powerhouse across the board.
Now Yow is retiring, and NC State is entering an incredibly important transitional period that will be led by Corrigan, who was introduced by Chancellor Randy Woodson as the school’s next AD last week.
Corrigan will be tasked with continuing to build on Yow’s unprecedented success, and NC State couldn’t have found a better person for that task than Corrigan.
Corrigan has spent the last eight seasons at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, where he has done as admirable of a job in transforming the Black Knights as Yow has done in transforming the Wolfpack.
After some rough years during the early stages of Corrigan’s tenure, Army has skyrocketed up the Director’s Cup standings over the last five seasons. In the 2014-15 season, Army was firmly in the bottom third of Division I teams, at 203rd. It moved up to 197th the next year before making a 34-spot jump to 163rd in 2016-17.
The rapid progression didn’t stop there, as Army made a massive 57-spot jump to finish 106th for the 2017-18 season, the second-highest finish among Patriot League teams. In the Director’s Cup standings for the current school year, Army was in 77th place thanks in major part to a 19th-place ranking in football, the third-highest finish for a non-Power 5 school.
That football success has been perhaps the most substantial change for Army in the past few years under Corrigan, which shows his ability to make the right call when it comes to coaching personnel. From 2000-2015, Army averaged just 2.88 wins per season and made a bowl game just once over those 16 years.
But Corrigan hired head coach Jeff Monken to take over in 2014, and just five years in, Monken has completely transformed the abysmal program. Army has won three straight bowl games and has averaged 9.67 wins per season over the last three years, capped by a program-record 11 wins in 2018.
The Black Knights football program is also now doing something maybe even more important to its fans than getting to double-digit wins and capturing bowl game titles: it is finally beating Navy. After 14 straight losses to the Midshipmen from 2002 to 2015, Army has won the last three iterations of the Army-Navy game.
Under Corrigan, the Army athletic program is flourishing, and the future looks bright for the Black Knights. In Raleigh, Yow’s put NC State Athletics into the national limelight and is leaving her program in the more-than-capable hands of Corrigan.
Finding the right person to fill Yow’s void was imperative for NC State at this place of transition, but it looks like the university hit the nail right on the head with Corrigan.
