Tim Peeler: Where does NC State’s winning streak stand in program history?
The sudden, unexpected postseason surge of the ACC-champion NC State men’s basketball team has eradicated some streaks of note that go back some 40 years.
After winning five straight games in Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C., for the school’s eleventh ACC title, the Wolfpack earned the league’s automatic bid into the NCAA Championship. Seeded No. 11 in the NCAA South Region, the Wolfpack cruised to a relatively easy 80-67 win over Texas Tech in its first-round game in Pittsburgh.
State, quickly becoming a national fan-favorite for success in the postseason, plays another surprise winner on Saturday when faces No. 14-seeded Oakland, which beat third-seeded Kentucky 80-76 on Thursday in one of the most stunning first-round upsets of the 2024 tournament.
That’s six straight wins for head coach Kevin Keatts and his charges, the team’s longest winning streak since it won seven in a row in 2018-19.
That year, the Wolfpack jumped out to a 13-1 record, opening the year with six straight wins, before losing 79-75 at Wisconsin in the ACC-Big 10 Challenge. It reeled off seven in a row, including its ACC opener at Miami.
A 90-82 loss to No. 12 North Carolina ended the 7-game streak and the Wolfpack finished the regular season by splitting its final 16 games.
Seeded eighth in the ACC tournament, the Wolfpack beat Clemson in the first round but lost 76-56 to eventual national champions Virginia in the second round.
When tournament time rolled around, the NCAA Selection Committee did not include the Wolfpack, despite a No. 33 NET ranking, the first-year metric the NCAA concocted to replace the controversial RPI rating that helped determine at-large bids.
The Pack’s exclusion infuriated then-athletics director Debbie Yow, Keatts and the body of the NC State fanbase.
With a 22-11 record, the Pack accepted a bid into the National Invitation Tournament, where it won a pair of games against Hofstra and Harvard at Reynolds Coliseum before losing a 94-93 heartbreaker to Lipscomb when Kenny Cooper hit a go-ahead shot with 1.7 seconds to play. Lipscomb’s Garrison Mathews set a school record with 44 points in the quarterfinal contest.
In terms of most postseason wins, six is the most since the Wolfpack’s last ACC Cinderella team won three ACC tournament games and two NIT games under first-year coach Sidney Lowe in 2006-07.
Lowe’s team won its first three games in the ACC tournament, beating Duke, Virginia and Virginia Tech in succession before falling to top-seeded North Carolina 89-80 in the championship game.
A regular-season home victory over North Carolina and its late tournament run gave State an unlikely postseason bid into the NIT, where it beat Drexel and Marist in Reynolds Coliseum before ending its season with a loss in the quarterfinals at West Virginia.
It’s been a long time since the Wolfpack has had the kind of combined success in both the ACC and NCAA tournaments that Keatts and his squad have the chance for this year. The most postseason wins in school history came in the famous national championship season of 1983, when Jim Valvano led the Cardiac Pack to nine straight wins as it won both the ACC and NCAA tournaments.
To match that record, the Wolfpack would have to win three more games and reach the Final Four in Phoenix the second weekend in April.
That leads to another streak of note: NC State has won five consecutive games in the Final Four (1950, 1974 and 1983), the longest current winning streak among college basketball teams.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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