Philip Rivers' high school job is the best thing on his NC State résumé

NC State is about to hire a high school football coach, and that's the best thing about the Philip Rivers deal. Everybody wants to talk about the quarterback with 13,484 yards and a 17-year NFL career. I'd rather talk about the guy who spent six seasons building a program in Fairhope, Alabama, out of nothing, because that's the one the trustees are voting on this morning.

Here's where things stand. ESPN reported Wednesday that Rivers has agreed to become NC State's coach and that the board of trustees is expected to finalize his contract at Friday's meeting. WRAL's Brian Murphy had athletic director Boo Corrigan in the room this morning and the board set to approve it. So this is happening.

The easy read is that NC State fired Dave Doeren on Oct. 24 and went shopping for a famous name. Russell Wilson was in the conversation too, ESPN reported, which tells you the school was at least flirting with the celebrity version of this hire. I've watched a lot of athletic departments do that over the years. You hire the name, you sell the season tickets, and three years later you're paying a buyout and pretending you never liked him.

That's not what I see on Rivers' résumé, though. ESPN says he built St. Michael Catholic from the ground up and took it to the state semifinals in 2024 and 2025. That's the job nobody gets famous for. You find the kids, you find the assistants, you figure out who's cutting the grass. Nobody hands you a scheme or a staff or a budget. It's the closest thing in football to running a small business, and he did it well enough that the Bills interviewed him for their head job in January.

And he made NC State wait. Sources told ESPN that Rivers wanted to finish his high school season first, and the school let him. That season ended last Friday. A coach who won't walk out on a bunch of teenagers in the playoffs is a coach I'd trust with a locker room of 20-year-olds.

Now, the fair objection. He's never coached a college game, never recruited against Clemson for a kid, never sat across from an agent over an NIL number, never managed a portal window. That's all true, and none of it is small. High school success doesn't automatically translate, and I've covered enough coaches who learned that the hard way. His son Gunner is committed to NC State as a quarterback in the 2027 class, too, and that's going to be a running storyline whether it's fair or not.

But every one of those gaps is something a smart staff can cover. The thing a staff can't give you is a head coach who already knows how to build something from scratch, and Rivers has that.

So here's how I'd grade it. Ignore the press conference. Ignore the old highlights they'll play on a loop. Watch who he hires as his coordinators and who runs his recruiting office. If those names have done the college work he hasn't, NC State just made a terrific hire. If they're old buddies along for the ride, then Corrigan bought a famous name after all, and I'll be the first to say I got this one wrong.

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