DALLAS — Two weeks ago North Carolina State had no reason to feel it would belong in the Sweet 16. But now that they’re here, the Wolfpack feel they’ve earned their place.
“We just believe we earned the right to be here,” coach Kevin Keatts said as the Wolfpack prepares for Friday night’s South Regional game against Marquette with the winner going to Sunday’s Elite Eight. “You just don’t accidentally get hot and win seven games in a row with the type of teams that we played.”
The Wolfpack had to win each of those seven games — the first five over five days in the ACC tournament and then two in the NCAA tournament last weekend — to get to this point. As a No. 11 seed, NC State wouldn’t have made the tournament without winning the ACC championship.
Three of their seven wins came against teams in the top 25, including North Carolina in the ACC title game. The Tar Heels went on to be the No. 1 seed in the West Regional.
The Wolfpack are the only team remaining with a seed below No. 6.
“I don’t think you can win seven games in a row in college basketball and that’s not your identity,” Keatts said. “I think that’s what tells us who we are. I go back to it, think about this now. You go into every game knowing that if you lose that you’re packing up and your season’s over.
“We were the 11th seed. If you watch us, we don’t play like that . … We don’t look at numbers, we just believe that we earned the right to be here.”
NC State hit the transfer portal hard last year, bringing in eight new players. Keatts said it took some time for everything to fit together.
It didn’t happen fast enough during the regular season to save the Wolfpack from the brink. In that sense, guard Casey Morsell said, NC State has been in one-loss-and-done mode for some time.
“We went into this postseason with the approach that it’s a new season,” Morsell said. “Even in our meeting before we went to D.C. [for the ACC tournament], Keatts wrote on the board ‘0-0.’ Every game was a championship, literally. We didn’t really look ahead. We never looked past anyone.
“That’s the same approach we’ve had in this tournament.”
