Kevin Keatt’s eight-year-old race as the main coach of the NC State Men’s Basketball Team has ended. On Sunday, the university announced its decision to share ways Keatts.
The move comes less than a year after Keatt’s coached Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference Championship and Final Four. NC State ended the regular season 2024-25 with a 12-19 record.
Athletic Director Boo Corrigan released a statement that thanked Keatts for his “contribution” and also recognized last year’s deep races in the NCAA tournament.
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“I would like to thank Coach Keats for his contribution to NC State and to always represent the university with the class,” read the statement from Corrigan. “He will always have a valued place in the Wolfpack story for the results of his 2023-24 team, and I appreciate the passion he brought to this role. We wish him and his family the best in the future.”
Keatts described over the past eight years “a dream.”
Mar 1 2025; Atlanta, Georgia, USA; North Carolina State Wolfpack -Head coach Kevin Keats on the sidelines against Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the first half of McCamish Pavilion. (Brett Davis-Preferred Pictures)
“When we enter this new era of college sports, I think wholeheartedly that I leave the program in better position to succeed than when I started – and that the basketball program continues to thrive when I am supported to the level needed to compete,” Keatts wrote in a social media post on Sunday.
Keatts went 151-113 in NC State, including 69-84 in ACC Play. His team earned three NCAA tournament bids, the last coming, when Wolfpack followed a five-game-in-five-day trip to their first ACC Tournament title since 1987 with an equally unexpected race for the program’s first final Four since the late Jim Valvano led the “Cardiac Pack” to 1983 the NCAA title.
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But he couldn’t maintain that momentum when this season turned into a crashout, with Wolfpack’s reloading through the transfer portal-who had worked well enough to get NC state for back-to-back NCAA-Buddoque turns out to be a big miss. NC State went only 5-15 in league games.
Mar 1 2025; Atlanta, Georgia, USA; North Carolina State Wolfpack head coach Kevin Keatts on the sidelines against Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the second half of McCamish Pavilion. (Brett Davis-Preferred Pictures)
The firing comes after Keatts faced several challenges during his tenure, starting to stabilize a Wobbly program on the field and then work for years in the middle of the shadow of a federal corruption study of the sport tied to predecessor Mark Gottfried’s office.
February 19, 2025; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA; North Carolina State Wolfpack -Head coach Kevin Keatts responds in the first half at the Dean E. Smith Center. (Bob Donnan-Preferred Pictures)
This case hovered for years before the program was placed in a year of probation in December 2021.
He arrived in 2017 from UNC Wilmington and promised that “Kevin Keatts is a winner” at his initial news conference. In many ways, he matched it, especially after the program was tied in Gottfried’s last two seasons after four equal NCAA messages.
Keatts started with a 21-win season that included taking up high ranked Duke, UNC and Arizona teams before reaching NCAAS.
