With NCAA sanctions finally settled, softly at that, NC State’s future is finally now
After four years of investigating, dithering, arguing, more investigating, more dithering and finally a referral to a new independent panel, the NCAA’s case against N.C. State has been resolved in a great big nothing.
Calling it a slap on the wrist is an insult to slaps on the wrist.
The Wolfpack has to pay a small fine, faces scholarship reductions and recruiting restrictions and has to vacate all 15 games it won with Dennis Smith Jr. on the roster, but there’s no postseason ban and no significant penalty for anyone still at N.C. State.
Kevin Keatts hasn’t caught many breaks in his five seasons at N.C. State. Two of his top recruits never arrived on campus, none-and-dones in the one-and-done era. He had an NCAA tournament-caliber team in 2020, only for COVID — “the coronavirus,” then, to use a phrase that dates the era — to shut everything down. Whatever chances his team had in 2021 were also wrecked by injuries and COVID pauses.
This is a big one.
This is the first time he’s truly had a blank page to move forward.
N.C. State can finally move on.
“There’s no questions about where we’re going to be, or if we’re going to be,” N.C. State athletic director Boo Corrigan told the News & Observer. “What we really did is remove the ‘if’ from the whole equation. ‘If this happens.’ Now, we do have an opportunity to move forward. And coach Keatts has an opportunity to move forward with this team.”
This is all a very small price to pay for that miserable 15-17 season with Smith, a season that didn’t save Mark Gottfried at State but got him fired before it was even over. It continued to cast a pall over his successor, so in reality N.C. State has been paying and paying, until now. The price was actually paid long ago.
This has been hanging over the Wolfpack’s head for almost four years, since the first subpoena arrived long after Gottfried was fired and Smith moved on to the NBA. Gottfried has since been fired from his next job, at Cal State Northridge, and Smith is now with his fourth team. He has yet to appear in a playoff game.
Gottfried faces a one-year “show cause” order from the NCAA, essentially a one-year ban for a coach not currently working. Assistant coach Orlando Early, who the IARP decided was the alleged bag man for the $40,000 paid to Smith, faces a six-year show cause.
This whole case has been a circus, from the nature of the charges — in Federal court, N.C. State was somehow legally the victim of Adidas’ fraud despite still collecting millions upon millions from the shoe company — to the NCAA’s rudderless handling of it to the sheer lassitude of the IARP process that has finally resolved one of the six infractions cases it was handed as long as two years ago.
Keatts has spent almost his entire tenure doing penance for the sins of others, operating under the cloud of uncertainty his disgraced predecessor left behind like a gas leak. These penalties are about as good as it gets under the NCAA’s still-broken model of punishing the uninvolved as a deterrent, but even more severe penalties would have been better than the mere threat of penalties that every opposing recruiter had been using against the Wolfpack.
It’s a real phenomenon: “We’ve been in a time period here where it’s been difficult for us to get the top-10, top-20 recruit. There’s no question about that.” That’s not Keatts saying that. Roy Williams said that at North Carolina in 2017, while that school was under investigation for academic fraud.
From this point forward, Keatts not only faces no major sanctions but is finally out from under the threat of sanctions. He can recruit unfettered to add to a team relying heavily on only one senior, Jericole Hellems, with the still-largely untapped potential of two sophomores — Dereon Seabron and Cam Hayes — and freshman Terquavion Smith, already a strong contributor, among others.
The bill has finally been paid. The leash tethering N.C. State to Smith and Gottfried has been severed. The cloud has lifted. The Wolfpack’s future is finally now.
This story was originally published December 20, 2021 at 1:33 PM.
