NC State’s miracle March is proof the NCAA tournament is perfect as is

Watching the euphoria play out inside the NC State locker room Friday night, it was easy to forget that there was a time when the majority of Wolfpack fans were ready to run head coach Kevin Keatts out of town.

That there was a time when NC State was life and death to beat Louisville, arguably the worst power conference team in all of college basketball this season.

That there was a time when it was easy to wonder if State’s near decade-long absence from the Sweet 16 could last another decade … or longer.

That time was 17 days earlier.

Playing on the dreaded opening Tuesday of the ACC tournament, NC State trailed Louisville — losers of seven straight and the team that finished dead last in the league’s regular season standings by a full three games — by a point at halftime. Despite the game being tied at 75 with just over four minutes to play, Keatts’ team made the plays it needed to in order to escape with a 94-85 victory and extend its season by at least one more day.

When the official NC State men’s basketball Twitter account posted a simple graphic with the game’s final score, the responses from fans were … not overly enthusiastic.

So, yeah, this was the general mood as NC State turned its attention to Syracuse in Wednesday’s 7 vs. 10 matchup.

By now, everyone know what happened next. State hammered the Orange the next day, then they stunned Duke the day after that, took down Virginia in the semifinals thanks to a wild game-tying shot at the end regulation, and then topped the ACC’s final boss, North Carolina, to claim their first league tournament title since 1987 and punch their ticket to the big dance.

The unbelievable run made the Wolfpack just the second team in college basketball history to claim their conference tournament title by winning game five games in five days. Their company? The 2010-11 Connecticut Huskies, who used the momentum from their insane Big East tournament championship run to vault into six more wins and a national championship.

The Pack, a team that had already lost 14 games before the start of the ACC tournament and which would have been hard-pressed to garner an invite to the NIT, let alone the NCAA tournament, if they’d been bounced at any point in D.C., was a good story, but not that good.

Or so we assumed.

Since that ACC tournament opener on March 12, NC State has looked like — and this phrase gets tossed around a lot this time of the year but it’s rarely been more applicable than it is in this spot — a completely different team. The squad that entered the postseason riding a four-game losing streak has now beaten Texas Tech (by 13), Cinderella Oakland, and second-seeded Marquette (by 9) to earn their first trip to a regional final since 1986.

This team’s run has often, and understandably, been compared to the most famous March run in NC State (and arguably NCAA) history: Jim Valvano’s famous longshot trek to the 1983 national championship. After an impressive Sweet 16 performance, that team needed to pull off an upset of a heavily favored ACC foe, Virginia, to earn their trip to the Final Four.

The only thing standing between NC State and becoming the first Wolfpack squad since that ‘83 team to crash the Final Four? Another ACC powerhouse, hated Duke.

It’s all starting to feel more poetic than a D.J. Burns drive, spin and dish in the lane.

One of this tournament’s underlying storylines has been the imminent threat of expansion, and the pre-tournament comments by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who stated that the tournament’s current setup allowed for bids to be “given away” to smaller conference tournament winners while more worthy power conference teams with 15 or 16 losses were relegated to the NIT or worse.

Predictably, some have used NC State’s wild run as evidence that Sankey, despite being piled on by the masses all month long, actually has a point.

After all, if a team that finished 10th in the sixth-best conference in America is capable of doing something like this, how many other Will Huntings are we excluding from March Madness?

The reality is that NC State is a prime example for why college basketball’s current postseason setup is damn near perfect.

Keatts always had the necessary pieces in place to have a successful season. Burns, a 290-pound mountain of a man with soft hands, nimble feet and tremendous passing instincts, is a unicorn. Arizona State transfer DJ Horne has been a pure scorer throughout his entire college career. Casey Morsell and Jayden Taylor had big game experience before arriving in Raleigh from their time at Virginia and Butler, respectively.

“The run is magical, but I’m going to say we knew this from day one,” Horne said after the win over Marquette. “We knew we were a good team. It was all a matter of just locking in and understanding our roles, and no better time to be doing that than now.”

For whatever reason, that locking and understanding didn’t happen over the season’s first four months.

NC State lost all three of the non-conference games they played against teams ranked in the top 100 on KenPom. Conference play didn’t go much better. After an up-and-down first month and-a-half, they lost seven of their last nine games to finish at 9-11 in the ACC, a mark disappointing enough to put their seventh-year head coach squarely on the hot season.

But this is the great thing about college basketball: Even after four months of disappointment, you still get the opportunity to unearth that unrealized potential, or to take that shot now that you’re fully healthy, or to just try something new since nothing else has been working. You still get the opportunity to play until you lose.

Major conference teams that have shown no indication that they’re capable of consistently playing with the elite of the elite in the sport don’t need gifted entries into the sport’s premier event. Why? Because they already have the opportunity to earn it. They already have the opportunity, like everyone else, to play until they lose.

Every underachiever has the opportunity to become a hero. Every tortured fan base has the opportunity to experience a March miracle. Every coach on the hot seat has the opportunity to earn … say … a 2-year contract extension.

Nothing about NC State’s November-February indicated that they were capable of even being competitive in neutral court games against the teams they have slayed in March. But they still got the opportunity to play until they lost.

They’re still playing, and we’re all the better for it.