NC State men make NCAA Tournament field. Here’s where the Wolfpack is headed

N.C. State men’s basketball is still going dancing, despite a rollercoaster of a season.

The Wolfpack learned Sunday where it will begin its NCAA Tournament: The Pack (22-10) will be a No. 11 seed in the West Region, beginning play at Dayton, Ohio, in the First Four, against Texas on Tuesday night at 9:15 p.m. The game will be televised on TruTV.

It will face Texas (18-14) for the second time this season after falling to the Longhorns, 102-97, in the Maui Invitational.

“I’m shocked by going to Dayton, but, look, we did it to ourselves,” N.C. State head coach Will Wade said Sunday after the bracket reveal. “I told our guys, there’s no victims in the room. We have a Quad 4 loss to Georgia Tech. We didn’t handle business down the stretch. We’re fortunate to be in. We’re happy to be in. I did think our metrics and some of our stuff was a little bit better, but we’re not complaining about being in. We’re in the thing. We got a chance, and now it’s on us to play better and to play well.”

First- and second-round games will take place in Portland, Oregon. If the Wolfpack wins its opening game over Texas, it would play BYU in Portland on Thursday at 7:25 p.m.

If N.C. State were to advance to the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight, it would play in San Jose, California.

Keith Gill, Sun Belt Conference commissioner and chairman of the NCAA Tournament selection committee, said the Wolfpack was among the “Last Four In.” The official seed list from the NCAA shows the Wolfpack seeded No. 41, just ahead of fellow First Four at-large teams Texas at No. 42, SMU at No. 43 and Miami of Ohio at No. 44.

A 1994 Duke graduate who played football for the Blue Devils, Gill also said the committee typically does not allow for rematches, but “bracketing irregularities” led to the exception for N.C. State and Texas.

“If you look in the First Four game between Texas and N.C. State, normally, we try to avoid repeat matchups,” Gill said during a CBS interview. “Those teams played in Maui earlier this year, but with the way that the SEC built the bracket and the ACC built the bracket, we couldn’t find another First Four matchup. We also couldn’t put them in a different region, so we ended up having to relax our principle there, so that we could complete the field.”

Predictions prior to the final announced selections changed regularly as prognosticators listed the Wolfpack as high as a No. 9 seed and as low as a No. 11. Its location on the bracket also varied through the final weeks of the regular season and as conference tournament games took place.

This is N.C. State’s eighth NCAA Tournament berth since 2012, and fourth in the past decade. The Wolfpack missed the ACC and NCAA Tournaments last season. The year prior, it went on its magical run to the Final Four.

“We’ve got another opportunity to play, thankfully, so we’ve got to take advantage of the opportunity,” senior forward Ven-Allen Lubin said Thursday. “This could be our last game. We just want to make sure that we’re prepared.”

N.C. State went 20-13 in the regular season and 10-8 in ACC play. It picked up a 98-88 win over Pittsburgh in the ACC Tournament second round. The following day, it lost to Virginia, 81-74.

Wade and his players have all said the team left opportunities on the table, especially down the stretch.

The Wolfpack ended the regular season on a four-game skid and lost six of its past seven games. N.C. State defeated Pittsburgh in its opening game of the ACC Tournament, but could not upset Virginia the next day, despite leading. The blown lead to Georgia Tech — which didn’t make the conference tournament and fired Head Coach Damon Stoudamire — also haunts the program. That was the Yellow Jackets’ last win of the season. It also lost to Notre Dame. That was a Quad 2 loss, but the Fighting Irish still didn’t make the ACC Tournament.

“Thank goodness we beat Pittsburgh,” Wade said. “We’d have been in real trouble if we hadn’t beaten those guys.”

ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi had the Wolfpack as high as a No. 6 seed in projections earlier this season. Despite the slide, Lunardi never listed the team outside the main bracket.

He, along with News & Observer bracketology correspondent Patrick Stevens, felt confident the Wolfpack would make the field of 68. They also believed N.C. State would earn a bye, avoiding the First Four in Dayton, Ohio, pending multiple bid stealers.

Despite a few bid stealers in the field, the Selection Committee opted to make the Wolfpack play its way into the field of 64.

“It’s been a pretty spectacular slide. There’s no question about it,” said Lunardi during a media call on March 9, ahead of the ACC Tournament. “The ACC, which has enjoyed a nice resurgence, both N.C. State and SMU, you could almost group them together, are working very hard now to miss the tournament. But, there are teams like this every year, and they rarely fall all the way out.”

Lunardi said N.C. State had help from other bubble teams losing and several solid wins on its resume. The team needed a win in Charlotte — which it secured — to feel confident that it would have a spot.

N.C. State finished with 11 wins over Quad 1 and Quad 2 opponents — it should be thanking several ACC opponents, like Florida State, for help with that. The team’s results feature wins over multiple NCAA Tournament teams and only one bad loss.

“There’s no victim here. There’s no woe is us. Woe is NC State this. ‘We got screwed.’ There’s none of that,” Wade said. “We did it to ourselves. If we wanted a better outcome. We should have had better results. ... We are who we are. We got what we deserve. We got what we earned. Now it’s our turn, and now it’s our time to see if we can do something with this opportunity more than we’ve done during the regular season.”

This story was originally published March 15, 2026 at 6:27 PM.

Jadyn Watson-Fisher

The News & Observer