With quick Will Wade hire and weak ACC, are things going the Wolfpack’s way for once?
In the long and tortured history of N.C. State athletics, it’s hard to remember a time when a Wolfpack coaching search aimed this high and went this smoothly. Will Wade was arguably the best available coach in the portal — there’s always been one for coaches — and Boo Corrigan had him locked up before Wade’s team was even eliminated from the NCAA tournament.
It’s a huge win for N.C. State, fueled in part by boosters who once again got a taste of things like ACC titles and Final Fours and decided, yes, that’s something we would like to be a part of again. For all that’s gone wrong with Wolfpack basketball — over the past few years, over the past few decades — it’s hard to remember such an unmitigated, unqualified success as this.
That does tend to elide, in hindsight, that in 2017, Kevin Keatts was arguably the top coach available, if among a generally unimpressive pool of potential candidates. Archie Miller would have been a disaster (and was, at Indiana). Chris Holtmann eventually ended up at Ohio State. Chris Mack moved to Louisville a year later and flamed out. If there’s one name that stands out from that offseason in retrospect it’s Wade, going from VCU to LSU.
Neither search, then or now, was like the prolonged rejection-fests that birthed the regrettable N.C. State coaching careers of Sidney Lowe or Mark Gottfried. (Gottfried, at least, saw the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, twice.) Then-athletic director Debbie Yow also moved quickly to land Keatts, without drama.
And for good reason: Keatts was a successful mid-major coach coming off an NCAA tournament appearance, with local connections and the Rick Pitino pedigree, and if he wasn’t Pitino himself, he was at least as good as there was out there at the time. Not “for N.C. State.” For anyone. It was a grim cycle.
There were much bigger names and stronger resumes out there this time, arguably none bigger or stronger than Wade. Whatever resistance Corrigan may have had to hiring the coach the boosters clearly wanted, he got over quickly enough. Wade’s name may once have been tarnished, and he may have been exiled to Lake Charles, but that’s all ancient history now.
So, for that matter, is the strength and depth of the ACC, in the midst of what may be the most embarrassing NCAA tournament performance in five decades. It may be a lot to ask of Wade to get the Wolfpack back to the Final Four in short order, but in this dismal ACC, competing for titles should not require a lot of runway.
Duke is Duke, as Pete Gillen would say. Louisville is back. Clemson has fared well in the shadow of a powerful football program. Beyond that? It’s not great. Jeff Capel can’t seem to build any momentum at Pittsburgh, nor can Steve Forbes at Wake Forest and who knows whether North Carolina can return to its historic standards now that the Tar Heels have hired a general manager.
The rest of the league is either on the way down to the bottom or headed up from there, which should make this a target-rich environment for a basketball-proud program willing to put the kind of resources behind the sport that a prospective coach like Wade would demand just to listen. The legends are gone. All of them. The ACC needs new legends, fast.
Wade won at Chattanooga and he won at Virginia Commonwealth and he won at LSU and it took him about a week to turn a Southland Conference school with no basketball history or tradition into the league’s runaway powerhouse.
Expectations will be high that he can do the same at N.C. State. And that’s good. They should be, for the school and for Wade. There’s recent success he can leverage by association and a weak conference that looks nothing at all like the one Keatts walked into eight years ago. For once, everything’s falling into place for the Wolfpack.
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This story was originally published March 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "With quick Will Wade hire and weak ACC, are things going the Wolfpack’s way for once?."
