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RALEIGH, N.C. — N.C. State fired men’s basketball coach Kevin Keatts on Sunday, an abrupt end to an eight-year tenure coming less than a year after the Wolfpack’s .
The school announced the move a day after the Wolfpack closed a 12-19 season.
“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 , 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 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 with a just-as-unexpected run to the program’s .
It was difficult to predict that Keatts would be out of a job a year later.
But he couldn’t sustain that momentum as this season turned into a crashout, 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 as the reigning champion to miss the 15-team ACC Tournament in an expanded 18-team league.
That included going 0-11 on the road, an ugly mark . 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 . 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 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.
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