Scotty McCreery’s Saturday show conflicts with NC State’s Final Four. How he’s making both

Country singer and Wolfpack superfan Scotty McCreery was all in for N.C. State all the way through the ACC tournament, but when the men’s basketball team landed in the NCAA Final Four, it looked like he was going to have make a tougher choice.

His fans, or his Wolfpack?

McCreery is on the playbill at Saturday’s daylong Boots in the Park festival in San Diego’s Waterfront Park, scheduled to take the stage around 6 p.m. PDT.

But 300 miles away, in Phoenix, the Wolfpack men’s team would be trying to extend their phenomenal run, taking on the Purdue Boilermakers just after 3 p.m. local time.

McCreery, a Garner native who attended NCSU and whose father graduated from the school, did the math: It takes from two to two-and-a-half hours to play a college basketball game and a little over an hour to fly from Phoenix to San Diego. Add in a little time on either end for shuttling between venues and airports, and McCreery realized it might be possible to satisfy his fans and indulge his Wolfpack fandom.

The “American Idol” winner would just need to delay his stage appearance by about 90 minutes, which would mean trading time slots with the performer scheduled up next.

“Y’all, I gotta give a massive shout-out to my man, Lee Brice,” McCreery said Wednesday in a video on X, formerly Twitter and Instagram. “Wolfpack Nation, I’m going to the game.”

McCreery said he reached out to singer-songwriter Brice, who has second billing on Saturday’s show behind Thomas Rhett, to see if Brice would consider trading performance times to give McCreery time to cheer for his team in person.

“It’s going to be a fantastic show. I wouldn’t miss it. Wouldn’t cancel a show for basketball,” McCreery said in the video, a possible professional dig at fellow country performer Eric Church, who did just that in April 2022 in order to attend the UNC-Duke Final Four Championship game. “But man, would I love to try to and do both.”

McCreery said he told Brice before he made the request he would totally understand if he didn’t want to do it, given that Brice is the bigger draw with more years in the footlights. But he said the performer told him, “Scotty, if it’s important to you, it’s important to me.

“It’s not even an ask. Let’s do it.”

Unlike singer Taylor Swift, who made news in February with her back-in-time flight from a concert in Japan to her boyfriend’s appearance in the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, McCreery doesn’t own a private jet. His publicist, Scott Stem, said McCreery — who was on a flight to the West Coast on Thursday — will make the jaunt from Phoenix to San Diego on a chartered plane.

“He’s so excited about this game,” Stem said.

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