Five North Carolina based teams qualified for the 2026 men’s NCAA Tournament, but after the first round of action, only two remain.
Two of the teams that failed to advance past their first game were the NC State Wolfpack and the Queens University of Charlotte Royals.
NC State was one of the last programs to even qualify for the tournament, as their resume fell apart with seven losses in their final nine games, and so they wound up playing in Dayton in the First Four.
Their rematch with Texas wound up closer than the first game, but the result was the same in the end as the Wolfpack saw their season end in a 68-66 loss.
NC State did battle back from multiple double-digit deficits and even tied the game on a late run with just 18 seconds remaining, but the Longhorns nailed a difficult jumper in the final seconds of the game to advance.
“A disappointing end to a pretty disappointing season for us,” Wade said after the game. “We haven’t been very good in close games, we hadn’t earned the right to win close games, and our season ended very similarly to the reason why we’re sitting in Dayton. You are who you are in pressure moments and we tried to mask some stuff and we couldn’t do it. That’s why we were here and that’s why we’re heading home.”
Despite the bold claims by new coach Will Wade of a return to form for NC State and a “Red Reckoning,” the team was pretty disappointing throughout the year.
They had their moments, but overall, the group suffered too much from inconsistent play, poor defense and a quite notable size problem in the front court, which all proved way too much to overcome.
But while this year was a flop, it did paint a better picture of what Wade will need to improve on for Year 2.
“There’s a lot of things we have to reset for next year,” Wade said. “We didn’t have the year we wanted to have and we have a lot of things that we have to make sure we’re in better shape for moving forward. We’re gonna be better. We put this together pretty quickly. We didn’t spend as much time on a couple things and just looked at some analytics. The personalities and some of that stuff is very, very important and we’re gonna do much more due diligence this year and we’ll have a better mixture of things moving forward.”
While the end of year emotions for NC State are nearly all negative, there’s quite a different feeling for Queens University.
Despite the first round loss, it’s clear that the Royals had a season to be proud of.
The ASUN conference champions immediately qualified for the tourney in their first eligible year — Queens made the jump to Division I in 2022, which came with a four-year probationary period from NCAA Tournament eligibility — becoming just the fifth school since 1972 to accomplish that feat.
The program has seen steady improvement each and every year under coach Grant Leonard and their first DI NCAA Tournament bid was well earned as they finished the season with a 13-5 conference record (third best) and beat both the No. 1 and 2 ranked teams en route to their first conference title.
“Really proud of our team, our school, our community and all that we accomplished this year and how we represented the entire institution, the Atlantic SUN and everything that we did,’ Leonard said. “It was an unbelievable season. Usually only one team ends happy, but our guys can hang their heads high.”
Even with the strong year, the Royals were simply outclassed in their first-round matchup, losing 104-71 to the Purdue Boilermakers.
Purdue entered the tournament as the AP’s eighth overall ranked team and they’ve long been one of college basketball’s elite programs.
“There’s a reason why they were preseason number one,” Leonard said. “They’re pretty dang good. They played fantastic, thought the offensive rebounding really broke us in the second half, broke the game open for them and then the second-chance 3s kind of put it over the top.”
But now that Queens has gotten its first taste of NCAA Tournament action, the goal is to get right back to it next season.
“Once you go, you want to go back,” Leonard said. “But the thing is, we’ve been a part of a lot of winning here at Queens and now everyone is going to be chasing you. You’ve got a big target on your back and the amount of work that has to be put in to stay there is more than you put in to get there. But our guys will be ready for it.”
