It's time to turn the page, or is it?

That should about do it.

Barring an ACC Tournament Championship which would require a run for the ages, NC State men's basketball will miss the NCAA Tournament.

The lowest NET-ranked team to make the tournament was Rutgers in '22 at 77. NC State sits at 86th in the NET.

'22 Rutgers was aided by their 6-6 record vs Quad 1 teams whereas NC State sits at 2-6 in Q1 games. (Wake bumped to q1 last night)

So yea, an extreme long-shot to make the dance.

For a once proud program, that's a disappointing place to be.

In my opinion, NC State should always, and I mean 9 out of 10 years, be in the top 64 teams in the country. Bare minimum. That is a low bar for a program with 17 conference tournament championships, 3 Final Fours and 2 National Titles.

A very low bar.

But here we are, 16-10, 8-7 in the league having lost 3 out of 4 and two games at home to bottom-tier ACC Teams. Not good Bob. As guest author, David wrote yesterday, NC State basketball needs an identity.

I'm not going to waste everyone's time writing a diatribe about Kevin Keatts' successes or failures, you can jump on Twitter for that after any game.

It's clearly time to turn the page and see what the next chapter brings us.

The programs needs it.

The fan base deserves it.

I'm not mad. I'm not angry. I'm dissatisfied with the state of our program.

I hate seeing a 2/3's empty arena. I hate seeing fan apathy growing and indifference setting in for a program I love watching and supporting.

The Keatts-era hasn't been a dumpster fire or abject failure like the Lowe-era, it just simply hasn't been good enough.

I've said it repeatedly in the PodChat and the last podcast with Matt Coe, Kevin Keatts' hire was a worthy risk at the time. He had just won 3 conferences titles in his first, and only, seasons as the head coach at UNCW. He was the hot name and in our backyard. It made a lot of sense.

But we've hung on too long. He's 128-89 in 7 seasons with just two NCAAT appearances. It hasn't worked here for whatever reasons but it was the right hire at the time.

As we see every year across all of college sports, predicting the success of your head coaching hire is hard.

Sure, with hindsight we can look back and see Keatts' resume and see the lack of depth to it but again he took a UNCW program that was floundering under Buzz Peterson (a UNC guy) to 3 straight championships in his first 3 years.

That's a helluva selling point.

And while you can't predict or control if the hire works out what you can control is how fast you learn. In today's landscape with the portal and NIL, you don't need 4-6 years to turn a program around, you should know in 2-3 years what you have with your head coach.

You should know if he's able to run & build a program that aligns with your goals fairly quickly but the key is being willing to move on when you have that information.

If you're going to fail, fail fast.

Set your goals high. Hit them or move on.

As soon as you start justifying someone's continued employment with cloudy reasons, you're failing slow and you're failing as a leader.

Refuse to accept the status quo.