Ten days changed everything: It’s really a new era for Kevin Keatts and NC State

Kevin Keatts wasted no time finding ways to remind people just how quickly things had changed. There was the ice-cream meme and ensuing T-shirts, obviously: five scoops in five days, playing on his personal tradition of taking N.C. State for sweet treats after road wins.

But he also showed up in Pittsburgh only four days after winning the ACC title in custom white Adidas Sambas, festooned with red-and-black confetti, a silhouette of Keatts holding up the fully sheared net in Washington and an image of the ACC trophy.

“One of my guys at the Adidas office made them,” Keatts said Friday. “They whipped them up quick. He sent me a picture and I said, ‘I love them, how can I get them?’ He said he’d have them to me by the next day and overnighted them.”

If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

If the past two seasons have been a game-by-game referendum on Keatts’ future, the kind of daily and weekly and monthly stress that inevitably takes a toll on coach and staff and players and families and fans alike, the past week has layered a considerable amount of relief amid the celebration.

It’s not just the raise and two-year extension Keatts got for winning the tournament. It’s the stability and freedom to start looking ahead and not just directly in front. It’s the ability to stumble without the fall being fatal.

That was the gift of the ACC championship. Thursday’s win over Texas Tech — Keatts’ first in the NCAA tournament and N.C. State’s first since 2015 — only reinforced it. And no matter what happens Saturday night against 14th-seeded Oakland with a trip to Dallas and the Sweet 16 on the line, there’s very suddenly a degree of solidity in the Wolfpack program that hasn’t been there in ages.

The perpetual crisis is over, for the foreseeable future.

“I really don’t have any control over it so I don’t really get involved in it, but I would say probably the amount of time I would see it, it was hard to miss,” N.C. State guard D.J. Horne said. “There was a lot of disrespect, so it was nice to go out there and get that done for him.”

The Keatts question was always an intriguing one, because the power dynamics were far more complicated than they might have appeared on the surface, even before the Wolfpack’s run made it all moot.

There was a chancellor with one foot out the door — Randy Woodson’s contract expires in June 2025, at which point he’ll have been in charge for 15 years — and an athletic director who didn’t appear inclined to engage in a messy coaching search unless he had no other choice. And Keatts retained the support of key boosters, at least to the degree they weren’t pushing for a change or lining up to foot the $8 million dollar buyout for Keatts and the retooled staff he put together in the summer of 2022.

(Not to be lost in all of this: Bringing in that trio of experienced, ACC-savvy assistants — Joel Justus, Kareem Richardson and Levi Watkins — unquestionably helped change the direction of the program and build the foundation this run was built upon.)

But even if there were some caveats, like the FBI investigation and the 2019 NCAA snub, until last week the Keatts era didn’t have a lot at the top of the page: no NCAA tournament wins, no ACC tournament runs, no season-ending KenPom ranking better than 41, an increasing number of unoccupied seats at PNC Arena. An athletic director who really wanted to make a move had all the ammunition he needed if N.C. State had lost to Louisville or Syracuse or even Duke.

So what happened in Washington was a critical turning point, not just in Wolfpack legend and lore but for the global sweep of the program’s future. At some point, the constant debate over Keatts’ future had to stop for the program to move forward, one way or the other. Keatts’ command of the transfer portal has been masterful, but when you’re coaching for your job every year, you’re naturally going to prioritize short-term results over long-term program-building. You can’t plan two and three years out when you’re worrying about saving your job every summer.

Now, the pitch to top-end recruits changes completely. They’re no longer being asked to make the kind of leap of faith, say, Rob Dillingham was unwilling to make — the Oakland-induced premature departure of Dillingham and Kentucky may have been bad news for the Pittsburgh economy, but no tears were shed by N.C. State — and there are tangible results to show for it.

N.C. State is no longer selling the chance to compete for championships. It’s selling a championship. And maybe more.

After beating Syracuse in the second game of the ACC tournament, Keatts and his wife Georgette sat on folding chairs in a quiet, spartan green room deep in Capital One Center, waiting for his players to be ready to return to the hotel. On that night, his future was still very much uncertain, a long and difficult road still ahead.

Nine days later, he walked the hallways of another NHL arena not all that far away, basking in the glow of another historic victory. He looked not only like a coach who has shed a great weight, but one whose team is playing like it as well.

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