N.C. State is not in the NCAA tournament but its next coach probably is.
That’s what athletic director Debbie Yow said after she fired Mark Gottfried on Feb. 16.
“The coaches that we will be looking at will be playing in the tournament,” Yow said then.
N.C. State has been able to gauge tentative interest in the job in the weeks since Gottfried was fired, but Yow will have to wait until the involved teams are eliminated to really make any headway.
That was problem last time during the coaching search in 2011. Yow identified Shaka Smart as her main target early in the search but Smart was adamant he wouldn’t talk about the N.