The best year ever for NC State athletics? A look at the Wolfpack’s accomplishments

After the final out of NC State’s victory over Georgia on Monday night, clinching the Wolfpack’s second College World Series appearance in four seasons, the question had to be asked:

Is this the best all-around athletics year in NC State history?

The gut, visceral reaction is … no way. How could it be? Considering NC State’s legitimate national championship pedigree — the Wolfpack remain one of just 15 schools with multiple men’s basketball titles — it’s a tough claim to make when neither the men’s or women’s basketball teams nor the football team hung a national championship banner.

But then you see the list of the Wolfpack’s accomplishments — and suddenly, the whole seems greater than its parts:

• Nine wins in football (tied for the second-most in program history) en route to just the 15th Top 25 finish ever;
• The first men’s basketball Final Four since Jim Valvano’s Cardiac Pack won it all in 1983, and the first ACC championship in 37 years;
• The second women’s basketball Final Four ever and first since 1998;
• And a (still ongoing) College World Series appearance, only the program’s fourth.

And that’s just the revenue sports. NC State also won its third consecutive women’s cross country national title, the ACC men’s swimming championship, the ACC wrestling championship and, for the first time in 40 years, the ACC gymnastics championship. (And as if that isn’t enough, NC State graduate Abby Lampe also won the international Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake competition — it’s worth the YouTube watch — for the second time in three years.)

📍Omaha, NE pic.twitter.com/psYIiRw9WD

— #Pack9 ⚾️ (@NCStateBaseball) June 12, 2024

Unlike so many schools, NC State is not some athletics wasteland; it has its dependable programs, like women’s cross country — in which it has competed for more national titles than any other school — or men’s swimming. But it’s the inconsistency in the major, headline-grabbing sports that dings the Wolfpack’s image.

This is why this year has been so special, and frankly, so darn fun for so many long-suffering fans. Consider that entire generations of NC State students came and went without so much as sniffing the Elite Eight, a 40-year-old highlight film serving as their closest brush with national significance. And then, the magic. Kevin Keatts entered Tuesday of the ACC tournament facing questions about his job security … and five days later had secured an automatic two-year contract extension by virtue of the Wolfpack’s five-wins-in-five-days miracle.

GO DEEPER

Welcome to Raleigh, N.C. Population: 2 Final Four teams

Wes Moore has built the women’s basketball program into one of the nation’s best, with three consecutive ACC championships from 2020 to ’22, but it took a so-called “rebuilding” season to make it to the last weekend of March Madness.

NC State football has reached higher heights — Philip Rivers led the Wolfpack to 11 wins in 2002, the program’s only season with double-digit victories — but nine wins, including victories over rival North Carolina and Clemson, is more than most programs can dream of.

And there’s still one great hope left standing.

In 2021, NC State was within one win of its first College World Series finals … but due to COVID-19 protocols, its final game against Vanderbilt was ruled a no-contest, with the Commodores moving onto the finals instead. It was gut-wrenching for the fan base, and the epitome of “NC State s—,” the time-honored tradition that Wolfpack supporters can’t have nice things.

But now, only three seasons later, the Wolfpack are back. Much like the men’s basketball team’s improbable Final Four run, NC State making it to this point has been more about capitalizing on the moment than sustained dominance. No disrespect to Elliott Avent’s team, but statistically, the Wolfpack aren’t great in any one area: They rank ninth in the ACC in both batting average and runs scored and 10th in ERA. Yet they went 18-11 in league play and won series over two other CWS participants, North Carolina and Virginia, as well as against three other teams that played in the NCAA Tournament: Clemson, Duke and Wake Forest.

A College World Series championship would be NC State’s first in a team revenue sport since 1983. And it might, depending on whom you ask, also confirm that this is the best athletics year in the history of the school.

The other contenders? Clearly, 1973-74 and 1982-83.

The crowning achievement of 1974 was not just winning the school’s first national title in men’s basketball, but how that title was won: by knocking off John Wooden’s seven-time reigning champion UCLA, in double overtime, in the semifinals. That alone, to some, may make 1974 the créme de la créme — and that’s a reasonable argument. On top of that, Lou Holtz also led NC State to the 1973 ACC football championship that season, behind the school’s first 1,000-yard rusher and ACC Player of the Year, Willie Burden. Tack on an ACC baseball championship and a men’s ACC swimming championship, and 1974 has its merits in this argument.

So too does 1983, obviously. Valvano’s Cardiac Pack didn’t win the ACC regular-season championship that season, unlike Norm Sloan’s ’74 team, but it beat Michael Jordan and UNC as well as Ralph Sampson and Virginia en route to that famous conference tournament title, then beat Virginia again in the Elite Eight. The women’s basketball team, led by Hall of Fame coach Kay Yow, also won its third ACC regular-season title. The school produced multiple All-Americans — Chris Ogu and Sam Okpodu in men’s soccer, Tab Thacker in wrestling — and distance runner Betty Springs (Geiger) won the individual cross country championship.

There was also the school’s first ACC outdoor men’s track & field title, and a third consecutive ACC wrestling crown. But considering the football team went 6-5 and men’s swimming did not win the ACC for the only time in a 15-year stretch, 1983 doesn’t have the totality of 1974 or the current athletic year.

There is no right or wrong answer, especially with the baseball team’s story still unfinished. But if the Wolfpack do manage to pull this off — to right the perceived wrongs of 2021 and capture the program’s first CWS title, and only the ACC’s third ever — then it would be hard to argue against this year as NC State’s best-ever in athletics.

Even without that honor, it still probably is.

(Photos: Joshua Jones, Tim Heitman / USA Today)