At this time last year, the North Carolina State Wolfpack just couldn’t seem to stop winning.
A team lacking much of an NCAA Tournament résumé suddenly crashed the party when NC State pulled off a five-game run through the ACC tourney and took it all the way to the Final Four as an 11 seed.
With all the usual caveats about the differences between last year’s roster and this year’s, the 2024-25 version of NC State just couldn’t seem to stop losing. And it finally cost Kevin Keatts his job.
Keatts, the coach in Raleigh for eight seasons, was dismissed Sunday—11 months removed from a Final Four and one day before the ACC Network debuts Why Not Both, a documentary about NC State’s men’s and women’s basketball teams making dual runs to the Final Four.
How’s that for awkward timing?
If anything, NC State’s Cinderella run was the part of the story with awkward timing. It was widely believed that athletic director Boo Corrigan was preparing to fire Keatts last season and couldn’t justify it once the Pack went dancing. The Final Four appearance triggered an automatic two-year extension in his contract.
But that was a flawed team that got hot at the right time—like, to a comical degree—and this year’s group enjoyed no such luck. Rated No. 124 nationally on KenPom.com, behind the likes of Middle Tennessee and Jacksonville State, the Wolfpack lost nine in a row from Jan. 11 to Feb. 12 and missed the 15-team ACC Tournament.
You can’t run the table in the conference tournament if they don’t let you in the field!
Keatts, for his part, seems to have a good sense of humor about the situation, ending his requisite thank-you statement with: “I am officially entering the portal.” It surely helps that NC State owed Keatts a buyout of nearly $8 million.
Why didn’t NC State try to stick it out longer with Keatts? Had the Final Four glory already rubbed off? It’s a three-part answer, as I see it.
More than just one down year, Keatts did not have much success whatsoever since leaving UNC Wilmington for NC State—some 20-win seasons, but only two NCAA Tournament appearances in his first six years. His inability to beat the likes of California and Miami this season further makes 2024 look like a fluke.
NC State is a basketball school in a basketball town, where the Wolfpack already have to play third fiddle to Duke and North Carolina even in a good year. Fans have high standards for the quality of play, and they didn’t show up throughout this year.
Curry Hicks Sage, a leading source for news and information about college basketball coaching searches, has a well-reasoned theory that NC State would not shell out this buyout if it didn’t have “an absolute killer lined up” to take the job. He believes that could be Will Wade, the former LSU coach caught up in an FBI bribery probe who is now thriving at McNeese.
Sure, Wade has to finish serving a two-year show-cause penalty for recruiting violations, but now that we’re in an age of college athletics where players are paid above the table rather than under it, he is no longer radioactive. Wade’s coaching ability and force of personality would reinvigorate NC State and could even bring the Pack level with their rivals in short order.
For now, Keatts gets the distinction of being the first coach fired one year after a Final Four for on-court reasons. Dana Kirk (Memphis, 1986) and Jim Harrick (UCLA, 1996) were let go for off-court wrongdoing. I wish Keatts the best in the transfer portal.
