It was less than a year ago that Kevin Keatts and N.C. State took over March, taking a wild ride to the program’s first Atlantic Coast Conference title in nearly 38 years followed by an improbable run to its first Final Four in even longer.
And now, Keatts is out of a job.
N.C. State fired Keatts on Sunday, an abrupt end to an eight-year tenure that saw the program’s fall this year prove too much to overcome even when framed against last season’s remarkable finish. The announcement came a day after the Wolfpack closed a 12-19 season and failed to even qualify for the ACC Tournament as the reigning champion.
“I want to thank Coach Keatts for his contributions to N.C. State and for always representing the university with class,” athletic director Boo Corrigan said in a statement. “He will always have a treasured place in Wolfpack history for the accomplishments of his 2023-24 squad and I appreciate the passion he brought to this role. We wish him and his family the best in the future.”
Keatts posted his own statement on social media, calling the past eight years “a dream come true.”
“As we enter this new era of college sports, I wholeheartedly believe that I am leaving the program in better position to succeed than when I started — and that the basketball program will continue to thrive when supported to the level necessary to compete,” Keatts said.
He signed off with a nod to players being able to transfer freely in a rapidly evolving college sports landscape.
“I am officially entering the portal,” Keatts said.
Keatts’ base contract ran through April 2030, which had included a two-year extension automatically triggered with last year’s postseason milestones. N.C. State would owe Keatts at roughly $6.9 million in base salary alone to buy out the rest of the deal, according to the contract.
Keatts went 151-113 at N.C. State, including 69-84 in ACC play. His teams earned three NCAA Tournament bids, the last coming when the Wolfpack followed a five-games-in-five-days ride to their first ACC Tournament title since 1987 with a just-as-unexpected run to the program’s first Final Four since the late Jim Valvano led the “Cardiac Pack” to the 1983 NCAA title.
It was difficult to imagine that Keatts would be out of a job a year later.
But he couldn’t sustain that momentum as this season turned into a wipeout, with the Wolfpack’s retooling through the transfer portal — which had worked well enough to get N.C. State to back-to-back NCAA bids — proving to be a major miss. N.C. State went just 5-15 in league play, suffering the ignominy to miss the 15-team ACC Tournament in an expanded 18-team league.
That included going 0-11 on the road, an ugly mark considering Keatts had made it a tradition for the team to get ice cream after road wins. The finale came with the Wolfpack giving up the last 10 points in Saturday’s loss to a Miami team that had won just six games all year.
The firing comes after Keatts faced multiple challenges in his tenure, starting with stabilizing a wobbly program on the court and then working for years amid the shadow of a federal corruption investigation into the sport that was tied to predecessor Mark Gottfried’s tenure. That case hovered for years before the program was placed on a year of probation in December 2021.
Ultimately, Keatts had five 20-win seasons but never delivered a consistent winner that Wolfpack fans have desperately craved, with the wild swing from the past 12 months illustrating that problem.
He arrived in 2017 from UNC Wilmington promising that “Kevin Keatts is a winner” in his introductory news conference. In many ways, he matched that, particularly after the program had bottomed out in Gottfried’s final two seasons after four straight NCAA bids. Keatts started with a 21-win season that included taking down highly ranked Duke, UNC and Arizona teams before reaching the NCAAs.
That was the first of the 20-win seasons, though one ended with the Wolfpack falling on the wrong side of the bubble on Selection Sunday (2019) and had another likely bid vanish when the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 tournament. Then came two years of struggles, notably with a program-record 21 losses in 2022 before the final two-year upturn that culminated with last year’s remarkable run.
And just as abruptly, it’s over.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.