As promised, Will Wade led NC State to the NCAA Tournament in his first season in Raleigh — barely.

The Wolfpack were among the last four teams in the field of 68 and will start the tournament in the First Four in Dayton. NC State (20-13) will play Texas (18-14) at 9:15 p.m. Tuesday. 

The winner will advance to face No. 6 seed BYU in the first round in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday.

“I’m shocked by going to Dayton,” Wade said Sunday night. “But I mean, look, we did it to ourselves. I told our guys, there’s no victims in this room. We have a Quad 4 loss to Georgia Tech. We didn’t handle business down the stretch. We’re fortunate to be in. We’re happy to be in.”

During his introductory press conference in late March 2025, Wade vowed the team would make the field. “This is not a rebuild,” Wade said at the time. “We’re going to be in the top part of the ACC next year and we’re going to be in the NCAA Tournament.”

Wade said he thought there was about a 30% chance that the Wolfpack would be placed in Dayton. He said there was no reaction – “wasn’t a word said” – from the team when the bracket was announced.

“If we didn’t want to be in Dayton, we should have beaten Notre Dame or Stanford,” Wade said. “That’s just the way it works.”

NC State is No. 36 in the NCAA’s NET rankings. They are the highest-ranked team with a Quad 4 loss. The Wolfpack lost at home to Georgia Tech, which went 2-16 in the ACC and didn’t qualify for the ACC Tournament. 

NC State also lost at Notre Dame, another team that didn’t qualify for the 15-team conference tournament.

NC State lost seven of its last nine games and nine of its last 11 to finish the season. The Wolfpack beat Pittsburgh in the second round of the NCAA Tournament before losing to Virginia in the quarterfinals.

“Thank goodness we beat Pittsburgh,” Wade said. “We’d have been in real trouble if we hadn’t beaten Pittsburgh.”

Texas beat NC State 102-97 in the fifth-place game at the Maui Invitational at the beginning of the season. Texas made 16-of-32 3-pointers in the first meeting.

NCAA Selection Committee chairman Keith Gill said the committee had to relax its bracketing principles to allow for a NC State-Texas rematch. With eight ACC teams and 10 SEC teams in the field, the committee couldn’t find a way to avoid it.

“There’s no ‘Woe is us, woe is NC State, we got screwed.’ There’s none of that,’” Wade said. “We did it to ourselves. And if we wanted a better outcome, we should have had better results. It’s a results-based business, and we didn’t have better results.”