Firing Kevin Keatts now was cold-blooded, but urgently needed by NC State in face of clear deterioration​on March 10, 2025 at 3:57 pm

NC State decided to move on from Kevin Keatts as its men’s basketball coach, firing the man who led the program to its first ACC championship since 1987 and first Final Four since 1983. It can be viewed as a cold, or even harsh, decision given what Keatts and the 2024 team did for generations of NC State fans, but the firing reflects a sense of urgency sparked by ego, emotion and, yes, some cold-hearted analysis about the current state of the Wolfpack program. 

Keatts, for his part, believes it’s in a better place now than it was when he was hired in 2017. He inherited NCAA issues stemming from the FBI investigation that rocked college basketball, yet posted 20-win seasons in each of his first three years. There was a bump in the middle of his tenure, one that included a school-record for losses in a single season (21) in 2022. Keatts rebounded with a strong 2023, however, and thanks to five wins in five days in the 2024 ACC Tournament, delivered the first back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances for NC State in a decade. 

There should be some pride taken in the work done to guide NC State through NCAA issues early in his tenure. There should be an immense amount of credit given to Keatts for how he pushed the right buttons and helped the Wolfpack keep their composure as they rolled off nine straight wins last year, with the last seven of those coming against NCAA Tournament teams. 

But just because Keatts was fired on Sunday does not mean he was not thanked or rewarded. Winning an ACC championship and making the Final Four triggered a number of contractual bonuses, including an extension. When NC State made the decision to move on it, was not only complicated by the emotions of showing Keatts the door, but by the financial obligations that came with a larger buyout than what they faced in March 2024. 

That brings us to the cold-hearted analysis of NC State basketball, because prior to the 2024 ACC Tournament there was a desire to make a coaching change. The Wolfpack entered that tournament as the 10-seed and trailed last-place Louisville, a dead team walking, by one point at halftime of the Tuesday afternoon opening round in Washington, D.C. If NC State goes on to lose that game, then Keatts might have been fired later that week and athletic director Boo Corrigan would have entered a coaching carousel that saw multiple mid-major coaches on the rise make a move. 

But NC State came back, blew out Syracuse in the second round, stunned Duke in the quarterfinals, beat Virginia on an absolute miracle end-of-regulation sequence and then vanquished rival North Carolina in the title game. Even if NC State had been defeated by Texas Tech in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the fact that Keatts had just beaten Duke, Virginia and North Carolina to deliver the program’s first ACC championship since 1987 would have made it difficult to collect the checks needed from the money people to make a change. 

Emotion kept the firing squad at bay, but there were reasons Keatts was on the hot seat. A proponent of the transfer portal even before it became the standard in college basketball, Keatts had mixed results with his evaluation and integration of new players. There were players that hit and a few years were everything gelled, but even the better teams lacked consistency in terms of results. NC State fans did not know what to expect — not just on a year-to-year basis but even game to game; highs were matched by maddening lows. Four of Keatts final five years saw NC State finish ninth or worse in the ACC standings as the Wolfpack continued to backslide in a conference that itself was backsliding from its typical standard among the best leagues in the country. 

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NC State could have moved forward with Keatts after this season, even with all the basketball reasons available to make a move, but the friction between coach and community started to damage some egos on both sides. 

Keatts’ typically positive demeanor started to fade during this season, and in February he started to take aim at the fan base for a lack of respect or appreciation for what NC State did the previous season. After losing to Louisville at home on Feb. 12, he expressed disappointment in the fan support (or lack thereof) in the building. 

“We’re busting our butt every day. And let’s not forget this. Let’s not forget one thing. Now, we did hang a banner, two of them. That hadn’t happened in 37 and 40 years. So let’s have some respect for that part of it,” Keatts said, before encouraging fans to continue showing up even as the team was losing. 

“If there was a fan that had a business, and they wasn’t doing well, I [would] still support their business,” Keatts said. “And when you in it, be in it — don’t be halfway.” 

Then, after snapping a nine-game losing streak against Boston College later that week, Keatts went to bat for guard Michael O’Connell, who hit the game-tying 3-point heave against Virginia in the ACC Tournament semifinals but was struggling this season. O’Connell faced unnecessary criticism from the fans, according to his coach, and Keatts believed the NC State faithful were “taking for granted” the success of 2024. 

“Don’t take it for granted because a lot of folks took it for granted,” Keatts said. “They had to wait 40 years for it to happen, and we did something special. So that doesn’t mean that this team gets grace, but Michael, man, guy hit a great shot against Virginia and, well, you would think he’s the worst player that’s ever played here. If it was up to him, he should have just retired right after the Virginia game.”       

The fact that Keatts recalled last season or bemoaned the lack of talent on his own team — “this team doesn’t have any superstars,” he said after the loss to North Carolina — wore away some of the good will established by the miracle run of 2024. Keatts didn’t think NC State was grateful enough, and NC State started to doubt whether it could afford to let Keatts continue to coast on hanging those banners. But making the move required passing the hat for what was now a much larger buyout, and having that money pulled together came after NC State completed one of the most embarrassing encores in modern ACC history. 

The Wolfpack went 0-11 in road games this season and 0-13 in road/neutral games. They did not have a single win against a top-50 KenPom team all season, but it was the way the Wolfpack lost on the road to bad teams that made the whole operation look broken. NC State led by 12 points with 6:08 left to go at Virginia Tech, a team that finished the regular season with a 13-18 record, and ended up losing to the Hokies by three. Then, on Saturday, NC State had an eight-point lead on last-place Miami with three minutes left to play, knocking on the door of their first road win, only to see the Hurricanes go on a 10-0 run to close the game and win by two. 

If there was an NC State booster or alum sitting on the fence about cutting a buyout check on Friday, there was nothing about Saturday’s performance that suggested a healthy state of the program. Going from an ACC championship to being one of the first-ever teams to miss the ACC Tournament is a huge ego blow to one of the league’s founding members and a community that has long valued its status from the ACC’s glory years in the 1970s and 1980s. 

There are many different ways that NC State could have performed this season to where missing the NCAA Tournament would not have been a fire-worthy offense for Keatts, but the drop-off was historically bad, and Keatts’ response was to allege ungrateful behavior to disappointed fans. Keatts wishes NC State had more investment in the wake of last season’s success, and NIL is absolutely a concern for the program as it tries to woo a coach to Raleigh in the coming weeks. But raising money for NIL requires some confidence on behalf of the fan base, and unfortunately, suspicion that nothing had changed regarding the coach they were prepared to fire a year ago was proven true. 

NC State also had to act because of the way things are changing in the conference. Louisville clearly just hit a home run with the hire of Pat Kelsey, SMU seems happy with the Year 1 success of Andy Enfield, and even Stanford had a winning conference record with first-year coach Kyle Smith. Throw in the changes that are coming this year — Miami and Florida State have already made hires, while Virginia will be next in line — and the school has to see how inaction could result in being left behind. 

There’s also the internal turnover of NC State getting a new chancellor at the end of the school year and the ACC entering into a new era of revenue distribution with bonuses for on-field success and TV ratings. Documentaries celebrating the 2024 season aren’t going to drive bonuses in that department, so if Keatts was not poised to put together a team capable of winning in the postseason, then the time was right to move in another direction. 

So was firing Keatts a little bit cold? Yes. But if the relationship between coach and the fan base was fractured beyond repair, then it was not realistic to think that a major NIL boost was going to come prior to the 2024-25 season. Making this move gives NC State basketball a clean reboot, where the Keatts-led Final Four run remains a reminder of what can happen without carrying along the baggage of all of the disappointment that followed.