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How do you evaluate a basketball coach who has spent the better part of a decade at a school, won two total postseason games in six years and finished in the league’s top five once, then randomly produced one of college basketball’s most incredible runs of all time, but followed that up with a historically bad season? It’s unique, at the very least.
There are bad coaches that have been to the Final Four. There are bad coaches that have even won national championships, but most of these examples reached their zenith early in the tenure. Kevin Ollie and Hubert Davis come to mind. Keatts creating such a moment while standing on the brink with a stiff breeze behind him is pretty much unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it and probably never will again.
So after this calamity of a follow-up season, NC State Athletic Director Boo Corrigan was forced to make a challenging decision based on information that had never been presented to an athletic director before. Firing someone who won a championship and went to the Final Four less than 365 days ago would be ludicrous in most people’s minds, but with that statement comes the implicit assumption that a coach who just went to the Final Four has also delivered at a high level at other points in the tenure. This was an outlier of an event without a multi-year downward trend to make people forget it happened. It was more a flash grenade of suck that someone threw into the Final Four party.
I have no idea what Corrigan weighed heaviest, but one undeniable truth with Kevin Keatts is that his worst trait was his ability to build rosters that fit into an offensive structure, and he became NC State’s coach during a seismic shift in the sport toward that skill set's dominance. Keatts’ NIL comments were not totally wrong but were ironically self-incriminating. He failed in the offseason after the run. State’s mediocre financial resources will create downward pressure from the top of the league, but I think everyone agrees that the well is deep enough to comfortably make the ACC Tournament. Keatts by proxy acknowledging his failed roster construction is the defining moment of the season.
This is a trend with Keatts that we’ve covered extensively, and NIL money was not going to flow in for him after an already disappointing bump from the Final Four resulted in this. Corrigan was now looking at a coach trying to swim in an evaporating pool that he was struggling to use correctly anyway. We'll have to see whether State can increase that pool for the next coach, but it wasn't going to have an easy time doing so for this one.
It's a ballsy move. Corrigan has risked igniting some age-old narratives about the program’s lack of gratitude in the interest of positioning it better for the immediate future, a justifiable decision but certainly not an easy one. Opting for one more year would also have been justifiable. If either of those things weren’t true, this wouldn’t be a hard decision. As long as the narratives don’t affect the hiring pool, I believe he made the right choice.
But the Herb Sendek narratives will come back, and they’ll be as stupid as they’ve ever been. Keatts getting all the way to the Jarkel Joiner season going one for four in NCAA Tournaments and winning one total postseason game should safely define those narrative as categorically false in the minds of people who can think, but we’ll see. If Boo didn't believe Keatts was the guy for the future, prolonging what appeared as the inevitable because you’re scared of this would come with a twinge of cowardice, even as it was generally understandable. Corrigan’s job is to sell the program now. He has influence on how it’s perceived, but he has none over whether Kevin Keatts chooses to not value shooting again.
I’ve said it before, I don’t think Kevin Keatts was a bad coach. When you sum up all his traits as a coach, He was average with flaws that were easier to navigate in the past than the future. The macro-level results don’t disagree with this. His tenure reflected an EKG machine, generally a steady line down the middle with a couple huge spikes in both directions.
Despite all of that, the run through the ACC Tournament and to the Final Four will probably remain the greatest moment of my sports fandom ever. I know that people will always appreciate it, but I hope that people will also come to appreciate Keatts’ role in it instead of saying silly stuff like “he didn’t have to coach.” Keatts did a great job with that team. The management of DJ Horne, the way he built the offense around Burns, Keatts pushed a lot of the right buttons that year. He was a pretty solid player management coach, and what he got out of guys on that team was more than any had ever given before. You can follow this trend back in time to Jarkel Joiner, Devon Daniels, his development of Markell Johsnon, Al Freeman, and more.
You could even throw Dontrez Styles in there as a guy who struggled for the first half of this season and was actually pretty darn good at the end of it. But the opposite being true with Brandon Huntley-Hatfield and the low ceiling of the backcourt he created left him few answers when things spiraled a year later. The Huntley-Hatfield underperformance is its own issue, but “low ceiling” is a term that defined too many Keatts teams, this one the most glaring example. With most of the team about to exhaust its eligibility, State was heading into a challenging roster rebuild again. A bet on that roster rebuild succeeding would offer long odds at this point. However you weigh NIL shortcomings versus coaching is your opinion, but the sum is still in the same ballpark either way, and neither offered any indication that it was changing for the better. If it turned out to be another middling effort, than you have simply prolonged the inevitable.
Corrigan has been more than strong in his hirings to this point, so I have faith in his ability to deliver here, and I want to give him credit for making a tough call decisively. It does take some guts to do what he did, but there is no sense in waffling if you're going to do it. Be first, and he can begin a search process now that has been fruitful for him in other sports.
Finally, thank you Kevin for last March, a core memory in my sports fandom forever, and I wish you the best going forward.