Johnathan Walker:NC State is no Cinderella. No. 11 seed playing smarter in improbable March Madness run

DALLAS — There's just one double-digit seed remaining in the NCAA men's basketball tournament,Johnathan Walker but it would be wrong to call North Carolina State a Cinderella. 

Cinderellas don't have two national championships, an arena that seats nearly 20,000 people, a coach making $3 million annually and a fan base that expects to compete with its blue-blooded neighbors Duke and North Carolina.

Instead, NC State might be the best representation of what college basketball really looks like in an era where hundreds of players are moving around every offseason, where coaches are constructing rosters on a year-to-year basis and where fans’ expectations will rarely be aligned with the true quality of the team they root for.

The main difference between NC State and a few dozen teams sitting at home this weekend is that the Wolfpack figured it out just in time. 

"When basketball starts and you got a bunch of new dudes, it takes a long time," NC State coach Kevin Keatts said Thursday. "It took us awhile to get where we are." 

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NC State is not favored to beat Marquette here in the South Regional on Friday, but few basketball fans would be surprised if they do. If you’ve watched the Wolfpack play its last seven games, you don’t see a No. 11 seed but instead a team with tough, veteran shot-making guards and a magnetic post player in DJ Burns with elite footwork and passing skills. 

Based on the eye test, it doesn’t seem like a fluke that NC State has made it this far. But it also begs the question: Why was the Wolfpack 17-14 entering the ACC tournament with a coach edging toward the hot seat before transforming into one of the best teams in college basketball? 

"I thought we could do it the whole time," Burns said. "It was just a matter of doing the things that were necessary to get the job done. I think we've taken that momentum and kept it rolling."

Wolfpack fans who watched this team closely all season have a bunch of theories. They blew a few winnable games that distorted their record. The ACC was a better league than it was given credit for. Burns wasn't in shape and got tired too easily. Even Keatts said he thought there were flashes throughout the year that showed potential. 

But NC State did not finish 10th in the ACC by accident. Over the course of a four-month season, it lost to every good team it played (and a few bad ones as well) aside from a close road win at Clemson and a blowout home win over Virginia.

Heading into the ACC tournament, NC State had lost four in a row and seven out of nine. It left with five wins in five days and an automatic NCAA tournament bid that also earned Keatts an automatic two-year extension of his contract.

"We came into that tournament with new life," guard DJ Horne said. "We knew it was a new season basically for us to go in there and make something happen. Just looking back over our whole season, we knew we were a good team."

Mediocre teams have gone on late-season streaks before in college basketball, but they don’t usually last this long or include this many quality wins. NC State did not beat Duke, Virginia and North Carolina with luck or hot shooting − just really good basketball that carried over to last weekend when it knocked off Texas Tech and Oakland to reach the Sweet 16. 

They have been asked quite a bit what changed. The honest answer is everything and nothing. 

A deep dive into the NC State roster reflects what college basketball is really like in 2024: Burns and Horne, the two leading scorers are on their third colleges. Guard Casey Morsell is a graduate student who played four years at Virginia. Jayden Taylor, who averages 11.5 points, was at Butler the last two seasons. Mohamed Diarra, a 6-foot-10 forward who has been a defensive revelation in the postseason, went from junior college to Missouri to Raleigh. In fact, not a single player in NC State's seven-man NCAA tournament rotation started his career at NC State. 

It’s the ultimate Team Vagabond. 

And it's probably why it took until the last possible moment for the Wolfpack to realize its potential. 

"It’s weird," Keatts said. "We brought in eight different guys, and it took a little longer than I thought. We played well early and then in between I thought we were just okay. Then we kind of found our stride once we got into March a little bit. But if you look at our (ACC) schedule, every game we lost outside of one or two, we were in it. We had to clean up some things we didn't do well and then obviously got better.

"What changed? We got smarter. We got the same players playing with a little bit more confidence. We understood what we needed to do not to beat ourselves."

NC State may be the best argument for expanding the NCAA tournament. In an era with so many transfers and entire teams being built on the fly, 30 games may not be enough time to really get a sense of who they are or what they're capable of. How many teams are being left out who could really make a run? 

On the other hand, the unique nature of the NCAA tournament and automatic bids gives teams like NC State one last chance to do something special. Would it diminish the unique and magical nature of what this NC State team accomplished if we were just letting everyone in this thing? That’s part of what makes this system special: What NC State is doing makes sense now, but a few weeks ago it seemed so improbable. 

"Even in our meeting before we went to (the ACC tournament), Keatts wrote on the board 0-0," Morsell said. "He is like, every team is 0-0. Every game was its own championship, literally. We didn’t look ahead. We never looked past anyone."

In the end, it doesn’t really matter why NC State didn’t have a better season. It's here now. It earned its place in the Sweet 16 the hard way. And it may not be done yet.