Late-night stakes: NC State gets one last shot at a resume-building nonconference win
It’s far too reductive to say that N.C. State’s best shot at the NCAA tournament boils down to one game in the middle of the night in San Antonio. The ACC season is too long, and there are too many opportunities to pick up resume-building wins, to put too much stock in Saturday night-slash-Sunday morning.
But there’s absolutely no question that this game against Tennessee deep in the heart of the Texas night is the Wolfpack’s last, best chance to get the kind of primo nonconference win that will bolster a resume that’s almost certainly going to be somewhere on the edge of the NCAA field.
The Volunteers may be 7-3, but their three losses are to teams near the top of the Top 25 — Purdue, Kansas and North Carolina, the latter on the road in Chapel Hill. They’ll be a player in the rugged SEC. It’s entirely possible that, by March, Tennessee will be UNC’s best win. For its own sake, the Wolfpack needs to be able to say the same thing.
N.C. State has two “good” losses — to Brigham Young and undefeated Mississippi — and no bad ones. The Wolfpack has largely done what’s been expected of it, for better or worse. It has neither helped nor hurt itself. But with all that data at hand, KenPom.com currently projects N.C. State to finish 10-10 in the ACC. With Louisville dragging the league down again, that’s a very dangerous neighborhood. Four teams that finished .500 or better in the ACC failed to make the NCAA tournament last year; three did two years ago.
Now, NCAA tournament selection is independent of conference record, and both those seasons were skewed by poor ACC returns in nonconference play, a lack of “good” wins available in ACC play by NCAA-quadrant standards and no-win games against Louisville, where a narrow win over the Cardinals often did more harm than good. (And losing to them, as Clemson did, was a disqualifying factor even at 14-6 in the ACC.)
The ACC is in better shape this season, with the non-Louisville league at large — even strugglers like Notre Dame and Georgia Tech — largely avoiding the kind of catastrophic losses to terrible teams that sunk everybody’s ship in the previous two years. N.C. State has done its part there.
But given the uncertainty how things will shake out in the ACC, and whether conference play will offer enough of the kind of “Quadrant 1” opportunities that are the best way to get into the NCAA tournament, all of that remains uncertain and entirely out of the Wolfpack’s control. But still within the Wolfpack’s control, still out there for the taking, is the kind of big nonconference win that a plus for the selection committee, even if it’s often a reason not to leave a team out rather than a reason to put a team in.
(Not that beating Auburn helped N.C. State in 2019 after going 9-9 in the ACC, but that was a systemic failure of the selection process.)
N.C. State had that chance last month against BYU in Las Vegas, and was well on its way to that statement win before that game descended into farce. It’s anyone’s guess whether BYU can continue its good start once it gets into the maw of Big 12 play, but it’s unlikely to fall too far. That was a golden opportunity for the Wolfpack that slipped away.
So there’s just this, then, before ACC play: Tennessee, on a neutral court, in what figures to be an eerily empty arena, with former Wolfpack forward Justin Gainey an assistant on Rick Barnes’ bench. There’s no shame in losing to a very good Tennessee team, and no one will hold a loss against N.C. State. It’ll likely be forgotten quickly.
A win would be remembered for a long time, especially in March.
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This story was originally published December 15, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Late-night stakes: NC State gets one last shot at a resume-building nonconference win."
