Kevin Keatts and North Carolina State reached the NCAA Tournament the old-fashioned way.
The way that existed before the bubble. Before bracketology. Before NET rankings, KenPom, the transfer portal, name, image and likeness and all the rest. Before the tournament field grew (and grew some more), when the only way to punch your ticket into March Madness was by winning your conference tournament.
N.C. State earned the Atlantic Coast Conference’s automatic bid by ripping off five victories in five days to capture the conference tournament title. The 11th-seeded Wolfpack pushed their postseason winning streak to seven and are now in the Sweet 16 for the first time in nearly a decade.
It’s been a thrilling if exhausting ride, the kind of run that saves jobs. It has also done little to alter Keatts’ view about whether the tournament should expand beyond its current 68-team format:
In an era where more than half the 133 Division I football programs qualify for a bowl game (while acknowledging this is not the purview of the NCAA), forcing 80% of the 350-plus Division I basketball schools to watch March Madness from their dorms seems outdated and unnecessarily punitive.