From hot seat to ACC title: How Kevin Keatts delivered NC State’s greatest moment in 37 years

Boo Corrigan stood off to the side here late Saturday night while N.C. State celebrated the most unlikely championship in ACC Tournament history — while the band played in the distance and while the players danced and while Kevin Keatts, the Wolfpack’s once-embattled head coach (but no longer) wore a smile of jubilation and maybe even relief. Corrigan wept while he watched.

His eyes were watery and red. Small tears ran down his face.

He clapped. He looked ahead, trying to hold it together.

More red and white confetti fell from somewhere above inside Capital One Arena, and he closed his eyes and stood there. And who knows what might’ve been going through his mind. Corrigan, the N.C. State athletics director, arrived here earlier this week hoping for the kind of miracle that manifested but knowing that if it didn’t — that if the Wolfpack’s tough-luck season ended in more disappointment — he’d have a decision to make.

Keatts, meanwhile, arrived here understanding his reality — that his future at N.C. State was in question, at best, and severely limited, at worst. As of Tuesday, Keatts’ seventh season as the Wolfpack’s head coach was trending toward failure. His team had lost seven of its final nine games of the regular season. In six seasons and counting, he’d never won an NCAA Tournament game. Not one of his teams had ever won more than a single game in the ACC Tournament.

Had the Wolfpack lost Tuesday or Wednesday or even Thursday, it would not have been surprising if Corrigan decided to take the program in a different direction. It would not have been surprising for a State loss on any of those days to be the final game of Keatts’ tenure. But now it was Saturday night, and the Wolfpack had won five games in five days, and vanquished North Carolina in an 84-76 victory that gave State its first ACC Tournament championship since 1987.

Now it was Saturday night, and there was a scene that nobody younger than about 45-years-old could ever remember seeing. State’s players were up on a makeshift stage. Arena workers were positioning a ladder near one of the baskets, so those players could cut down the net. Thousands of State fans remained, meanwhile, taking in a sight a great many had come to believe they might never see again. Not in this lifetime or any other.

And then here was Corrigan, crying.

“Tears of joy,” he said. “I’m an emotional guy ...”

He was thinking, he said, of “what it means to everyone. What it means to the guys in the program. What it means to everyone for the last 30 years, what we’ve been through,” and recently it was Keatts who’d been through the most — who’d been through a regular season of turmoil, of losses and mounting apathy surrounding his program; of the reality beginning to settle in that maybe this wasn’t going to work, that maybe he wasn’t the guy.

And now?

“I’m so proud of him, and what he’s done,” Corrigan said. “And being around the team this week, it was unwavering.”

KEVIN KEATTS IS A WINNER

Keatts is almost certainly the first coach in ACC history to go from possibly losing his job to winning the ACC Tournament, in the span of less than a week. He is certainly, without any qualifiers, the only coach who’s ever led an ACC team to five victories in five tournament days, or even to four victories in four days. When Keatts became State’s head coach in 2017, the signature moment of his introductory press conference became immediately clear.

“Kevin Keatts is a winner,” he said then.

Gradually, though, fans began using the phrase against him. It became a sarcastic cry of frustration; something for disillusioned supporters to mock. And then there he was, climbing the ladder late Saturday night, pulling the net off one of the rims and waving it around as he turned and flashed a smile that, despite all the difficulty, has still come easily to him.

Keatts accomplished something Saturday night that no N.C. State coach had since Jim Valvano in 1987. The difference is that Valvano quickly endeared himself. There was the miracle run in 1983 — the memory of which State rekindled in Washington — but there was also the big personality and the connections Valvano built. Then there was this, too: After the Wolfpack won that 1987 ACC title, it had as many ACC Tournament championships as UNC, and more than Duke.

For the Wolfpack, there was a feeling of belonging in those days. Then came more than 30 years of misery: Valvano’s forced resignation in 1990 and his death, from cancer, in 1993; the program’s decline throughout the ‘90s; the struggle, since, to find a head coach capable of leading State back.

There were chances, before Saturday, and every time the Wolfpack stumbled. Herb Sendek led State to three ACC Tournament championship games and lost them all — one when his short-handed first team ran out of gas against UNC in 1997 and another against Duke, in 2003, when it surrendered a 15-point second half lead amid an avalanche of J.J. Redick 3-pointers. Sidney Lowe led State to the conference championship game in his first season in 2007 but, like in ‘97, that team couldn’t close.

And that was one of the questions, again, facing State Saturday night: Did it have anything left?

“I will say my legs hurt right now,” DJ Burns, the Wolfpack’s hefty but deft forward, said after he earned tournament MVP honors. He and his teammates, though, left little doubt. They had plenty left. Five days, five games — one in overtime. No problem, apparently. Not for this team.

Not for a group motivated, in part, by a desire to prove Keatts’ mettle.

“He’s a winner,” said Jayden Taylor, the junior guard. “He’s a winner.”

“What are they going to say now?”

“WHY NOT US?”

Taylor, for one, heard and saw all the criticism. He read “the hateful comments,” as he put it, and as much as he and others tried to block them out, “We’re real people, too.” No member of State’s team had to feel the criticism surrounding Keatts more sharply than Keatts’ son, KJ, a sophomore walk-on guard for the Wolfpack.

He’d spent part of his childhood bouncing around while his dad moved up the coaching profession, from an assistant at Louisville to head coach at UNC-Wilmington; from there to Raleigh seven years ago. The Keatts family put down roots in Raleigh and KJ attended Broughton High, and then Grace Christian before coming to State.

Throughout tournament week in Washington, KJ played an important role: He was the guy, listed at 165 pounds, his teammates picked up and carried toward the large tournament bracket hanging on the wall near the State locker room. The idea was to make him look like Superman, flying, and then when he reached his destination he’d slap a big Wolfpack sticker in the next round.

There was only one more place for a sticker Saturday night, and after it’d been stuck there — in the spot reserved for the tournament champion — KJ considered what this meant to his dad. Was it any sweeter, given all the grief the elder Keatts had received? Any more satisfying?

“It definitely makes it better,” KJ said. “But you know, that noise was just outside noise to us. We like to keep things close to (home), in-house.” It was difficult, though, not to get too emotional, seeing his father up on the ladder, cutting down the last of a net.

“Just happy for him; happy for my mom,” said KJ, and soon he had his moment with the ACC championship trophy. He sat with it for a while, surrounded by joyous teammates and empty water bottles — made to look a little like ones that might carry champagne — that players had emptied on each other.

Nearby, Michael O’Connell, whose improbable, buzzer-beating 3-pointer at the end of the regulation allowed the Wolfpack to reach this point, was holding court with a few reporters. And DJ Horne, a Cary native who transferred to State from Arizona State, was telling another group this was “the real reason I came home,” to win a conference championship.

“Like I said,” said Horne, who scored a team-high 29 points, “why not us?”

That had become something of an unspoken team mantra: “Why not us?

Why not the Wolfpack, which hadn’t done anything like this in almost four decades?

Why not Burns, State’s 275-pounder, for tournament MVP?

Why not Horne, making his case to be the best player on the court Saturday night?

Why not Kevin Keatts, his tenure at State left for dead, delivering a coveted moment and triumph?

WOLFPACK’S IMPROBABLE DREAM, REALIZED

“It’s a dream come true,” Casey Morsell, the senior guard in his third year at State, said in the delirious moments after he’d climbed the ladder, himself. “That’s focus and motivation, man.

“Like even if you’re down, and you’re in a hole — it’s not over until it’s over.”

Indeed, until very recently, the Wolfpack had been down and in a hole and though several other State teams had done worse over the past 30 years, the apathy surrounding this one reached new heights. Empty seats abounded at PNC Arena. A loss at Florida State on Feb. 27 felt like a dagger, though afterward Keatts insisted his team still had a chance to make the NCAA Tournament.

Then State lost its final three games to end the regular season on a four-game losing streak.

There was nobody outside of State’s locker room who believed a run like this might be possible. And even within it, the hope, at the start of the week, sounded like the stuff of unrealistic and far-fetched sporting dreams — like how little boys grow up dreaming of being Major League ballplayers; or how every kid envisions making the game-winner as time expires.

Win five games in five days? Win a first ACC Tournament title in 37 years?

Beat the ACC’s best teams and programs to do it? Duke and Virginia and UNC, on back-to-back-to-back nights?

OK, guys. Sure. Sounds good.

And then, next thing anyone knew, it was really happening.

Next thing anyone knew, it was the Wolfpack on Saturday night imposing its will — dictating the pace, playing fast, being the aggressor. It was State, knocking UNC back, and not the other way around.

“We just couldn’t guard them tonight,” Hubert Davis, the UNC coach said, and Davis early on had tried to bring more out of his team, knowing all of a sudden what it was up against.

The Wolfpack held the lead for more than 33 minutes. The Tar Heels led for 64 seconds.

“We’ve been getting crushed — when I say we, N.C. State — by not delivering any championship in 37 years,” Keatts said. “Well, they can’t say that now because we got one tonight.”

He called it “a great story,” what his team had done.

A No. 10 seed, left to start its postseason journey on the scrap heap of Tuesday at the ACC Tournament, going from there to the top of the ladder to cut down the nets. A team whose NCAA Tournament hopes were nonexistent, winning its way there; crashing the Big Dance.

A once-proud program that hadn’t won this tournament in 37 years; a team that looked doomed or cursed or both, in the recent tradition of N.C. State men’s basketball; a head coach whose future, to put it mildly, was in question less than a week ago ... all of those things.

And then to do it the way State did it, beating Duke and Virginia and especially Carolina, who has supplied State with so much of its pain, and so often. But not on this night, after 40 minutes that felt like old times for two old rivals, in what was the last ACC Tournament of its kind.

“It’ll be a great story for a long time,” Keatts said, and he was as much of a leading character in it as anyone, and perhaps more so. He was, arguably, the main character — the coach who showed up to the tournament with his job in jeopardy and left less than a week later with a two-year contract extension (automatic, with State’s victory), a $400,000 raise and a moment a school and its long-suffering supporters have craved for more than 30 long years.