NC State basketball fires head coach Kevin Keatts

Kevin Keatts eight-year run as the head coach of the N.C. State men’s basketball team has come to an abrupt end. On Sunday, the university announced its decision to part ways Keatts.

The move comes less than a year after Keatts coached the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference championship and the Final Four. N.C. State ended the 2024-25 regular season with a 12-19 record.

Athletic director Boo Corrigan released a statement thanking Keatts for his “contributions” and also acknowledged last year’s deep run in the NCAA tournament.

“I want to thank Coach Keatts for his contributions to N.C. State and for always representing the university with class,” the statement from Corrigan read. “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 described 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 wrote in a social media post on Sunday.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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