NC State fired coach Kevin Keatts on Sunday, which matters to us today in the context of what I wrote yesterday, about the UVA Basketball coach search being fluid.
So many moving pieces.
This is why the headshot of me on the website has me with no hair.
First, specific to Keatts – this was unexpected in the industry, just because State isn’t thought of as having a lot of extra money lying around to spend on firing a coach, one, and two, isn’t Keatts less than a year out from taking the Pack to the Final Four?
Checks notes: ESPN has a documentary on the 2024 Final Four run premiering tomorrow night.
Awkward.
This year’s edition of the Cardiac Pack lost three of its last four, including a buzzer-beating loss at ACC doormat Miami on Saturday, to finish 12-19, 5-15 in the ACC, and on the outside looking in with respect to the ACC Tournament – State is one of the three schools, along with Miami and Boston College, that won’t be making the trip to Charlotte.
That 2024 Final Four run, though, gave Keatts an automatic two-year extension that tethered him to State, and State to him, through April 2030, and kicked his annual salary up from $2.7 million to $3.1 million per year.
ICYMI
The buyout cost is $6.75 million, which isn’t chump change for a school with athletics spending in the middle of the pack in the ACC.
With that as the backdrop, the AD at State, Boo Corrigan, didn’t just wake up Sunday and decide, You know what, gonna fire Kevin this morning.
Remember, Keatts was on the firing line going into last year’s ACC Tournament, which the Pack went into as the #10 seed, and NC State trailed #15 seed Louisville in the second half before rallying for the 94-85 win that set the tone for the week.
If State doesn’t cut down the nets on Saturday night – more to the point: if Isaac McKneely makes the front end of a one-and-one with 5.1 seconds left in the semifinal – Keatts is done last March.
ICYMI
- Back on the bubble: Virginia collapses in all respects, falls to NC State in OT
- Tony Bennett on NC State loss: ‘I believe I made a mistake at the end of the game’
As the losses mounted this season – Virginia beat State, 70-67, on New Year’s Eve, starting a stretch of 11 losses in 12 games for the Pack – Corrigan almost certainly put together an advisory group, akin to what Carla Williams put together after Tony Bennett stepped down in October, to think through the next steps.
That effort would have included lining up donor dollars to support buying out Keatts, and then identifying candidates to be the next coach.
This is where the UVA Basketball job re-enters the story.
I wrote, yesterday, about the search committee appearing to coalesce around Ryan Odom, currently at VCU, as the top choice – which makes me assume something has happened with the guy that I’d been told had been the leader in the clubhouse as of just a few days ago, Marquette coach Shaka Smart, that moved his name down the board.
ICYMI
The complicating factor with respect to Odom vis-à-vis NC State: the idea being floated to me that Corrigan, the son of former UVA Athletics Director Gene Corrigan, and Odom, the son of former UVA Basketball assistant Dave Odom, have some sort of personal relationship due to their familial UVA Athletics ties.
I can’t speak to that one way or the other, other than, this is what is blowing up in texts and emails this morning.
Could this be why it was reported to me, and then by me, that a wild card, in the form of Drake coach Ben McCollum, is said to have entered the UVA search process here at this late date?
I don’t that UVA loses out on Odom to NC State if the issue is money – Tony Bennett was getting $4 million-plus – or if it’s a matter of being able to compete year in, year out in the ACC.
Bennett won six ACC regular-season titles in his last 11 years, and he raised the profile of the program such that even though ESPN didn’t seem to want to acknowledge it, the ACC went from being a two-team, Duke-UNC league, to a three-team, Duke-UNC-UVA league, with Bennett at the helm.
State, meanwhile, is the third-most-important program in a 30-mile radius of its campus, with a problem in terms of money and resources that is only going to be exacerbated by having to pay millions to a guy to not be the basketball coach.
Those would be the cons on the list of pros and cons for Odom with respect to the NC State job.
The pros: one, if he has a personal relationship with Corrigan, that can go a long way, in terms of one’s ability to do the job, knowing personally the guy that you ultimately answer to.
Two, it might not be as challenging to recruit to State as it would be UVA, which notoriously doesn’t make it easy for its coaches across the athletics spectrum to get its recruits through admissions.
Bottom line: UVA is going to get the guy that it wants, but at the same time, it wants a guy who wants to be there.
Literally a day ago, the bulls-eye was on Ryan Odom.
This Kevin Keatts news might change the calculus.
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Chris Graham
