When: Wednesday December 17 – 7:00 PM
Where: James T Valvano Arena at William Neal Reynolds Coliseum
Opponent: Texas Southern Tigers (Southwest Atlantic Conference (SWAC) )
Prediction – KenPom (KP) / Bart Torvik (BT): NC State 94-65 / NC State 97-67
Coach Wade after the Kansas game:
“We are massively better than we were 10 days ago when we left Auburn
If we keep making progress, I feel good about where we will be at the end of the year.
Are we where we want to be? Absolutely not. I’m disappointed that we haven’t put a better product out there for the fans, but we will.
At the end of the day, we’ve got to start winning some of these games
Good things are going to happen. I believe in this team.”
Texas Southern is an HBCU located in Houston.
Coach Johnny Jones is from the Dale Brown coaching tree. He played for Brown at LSU and made it to the 1981 Final Four – losing to Ralph Sampson’s UVA team, and later worked 12 seasons as one of Brown’s assistants.
Small World! Coach Jones immediately preceded Will Wade as the LSU basketball head coach. He led the Tigers to one NCAA tournament, coincidentally losing to NC State – on BeeJay Anya’s legendary last second shot. He was hired by Texas Southern when Wade replaced him at LSU.
Media predicts them finishing 5th in the SWAC preseason voting
(This is a brief review of our opponent’s season to date. This lists their opponent, their KenPom rank to evaluate the quality of the opponent, the score with NC State’s opponent’s score first, and a sentence or two about the game where informative. If the description is “Blowout”, it was not competitive.)
Prediction – There’s no mercy rule (or crying) in college basketball. Final score 180-69.