RALEIGH, N.C. — If this is a one-year referendum on Kevin Keatts’ future at N.C. State, he doesn’t want to hear it. Same for reflections upon last season’s debacle, which went sideways in the first minute and never really got any better on the way to an 11-21 finish and only four wins in the ACC.
Keatts stepped back, analyzed, assessed, drew conclusions — swapped out his entire coaching staff — and then left what he called a “very humbling” year behind, for good.
Rather than think about the recent past or future, he found himself taking solace in the more distant past, his first few seasons at N.C. State, when the Wolfpack either made the NCAA tournament or should have, when Kevin Keatts Was A Winner, when things seemed to be on their way up.
“I’m the toughest on myself, whether it’s a good or bad season,” Keatts told The News & Observer. “I put my head down. I looked at everything. I had to look at everything. And when I looked at everything, what I came up with is, ‘Hey, let’s get back to the way we were our first few years. Let’s get back to playing the way we were.’ ”
That may sound simplistic but it also reflects the evaporation of the NCAA cloud that hung over the program, a drag on recruiting that kept Keatts from capitalizing on the momentum of the March Madness trip in 2018 or even the NIT run in 2019 with a team that won enough games to make the NCAA tournament, just not against the right teams. (It did, famously, beat Auburn.) N.C. State had a decent shot of making the tournament in 2020 as well, back in the Before Times, maybe even making a run in the ACC tournament after winning its opener.
Throw in a couple of none-and-done recruits in the one-and-done era, and momentum sagged and the pipeline slowed to a trickle. When the COVID Years happened, N.C. State had neither the depth nor breadth of talent to weather the new challenges, let alone the injuries to Devon Daniels or Manny Bates or anyone else. The results speak for themselves.
That may all sound like excuses, and maybe it all is. Other programs have gone through similar privations without bottoming out the way N.C. State did last season. But Keatts retains the public support of athletic director Boo Corrigan, who endorsed the offseason turnover on the staff and seems willing to see if Keatts can coach his way back to where he was when he started.
“I think there’s a new energy around the program right now and what the transfers have brought, what our new assistant coaches have brought to it,” Corrigan told The N&O’s ACC Now podcast. “Kevin is invigorated right now and I’m excited about what happens when we tip it off this fall.”
The assistant coaches all had options, whether it was Levi Watkins coming home to N.C. State, Joel Justus coming home to North Carolina — the former John Calipari assistant at Kentucky is the son of a former Wake Forest athletic executive — or Kareem Richardson staying in the ACC. They all had reasons to be here and had other places they could have gone.
As much as a talent drain plagued N.C. State, the Wolfpack had a brain drain as well, same as the one that played a key role in the decline of Duke football.
From his initial staff, both Takayo Siddle (now at UNC Wilmington) and A.W. Hamilton (Eastern Kentucky) earned head-coaching jobs, but they weren’t replaced with similar rising stars. This new staff is more like what Keatts started with. It meant parting ways with people close to Keatts, but it might also have been the kind of jolt the program needed — not just new voices and new energy, but new ideas.
“We were affected by a lot of things the last couple of years,” Keatts said. “These are not excuses. This is just reality. We wanted to get back, let’s get back to work. Let’s bury our heads. Let’s own up. Let’s take responsibility. Let’s move on. I haven’t really looked at it any different way.”
And while it seems like N.C. State’s had more outgoing than incoming transfers lately — a trend that predates Keatts, to be sure — the hope is Jack Clark, Jarkel Joiner, D.J. Burns and Dusan Mahorcic can provide an immediate influx of the kind of useful talent the Wolfpack lacked last season to help a developing star like Terquavion Smith thrive. If anyone can stop opponents from playing volleyball on the boards, it’ll be a start.
Even in the transfer-portal era of team-building, N.C. State is almost as far at the extremes as Wake Forest was a year ago. That would be the hope, that the Wolfpack can conjure something out of what appears to be nothing the way the Demon Deacons did a year ago. (Not that it was good enough to get Wake Forest into the NCAA tournament, but that’s another story.) None of the Wolfpack’s transfers look like ACC-caliber stars, but neither did Wake’s Alondes Williams at this time last year.
From staff to roster to the recruiting trail, it’s a fresh start for everyone — even Keatts, who still has to prove that the past couple years were an aberration, not the new normal.
If things turn sour again, and the mob votes with its feet the way it did last season, there isn’t a lot of room for patience. N.C. State is not a university that can function, spiritually, with a basketball team that isn’t at the very least routinely competitive. Obviously, the ambition goes far beyond that, but that’s the bare minimum the Wolfpack didn’t meet last season.
Whether that’s Keatts’ fault or not, heavy is the head that wears a 4-16 ACC record. There’s only one way to shed that baggage.
