What does winning out in the regular season do for NC State’s tournament chances?

Out of curiosity, and because I simply cannot help myself, I decided to look into what winning out would do for NC State’s NCAA case, and Bart Torvik’s website allows me to do that. Heading into today, State is obviously well out of contention for an at-large bid—some 27 spots off the last at-large position, Torvik’s site estimates.

Projecting ahead assuming that State wins out—at UVA, vs. Pitt, at Notre Dame, vs. VT—and the picture improves substantially, but the Wolfpack remains in need of a lot of help.

That winning streak moves NC State into the “next four out” tier, which I guess at least would allow us to dream a bit heading into the ACC tournament? Hey, I’m looking for any slice of hope. The win at UVA would go down as a quad one win, while the ND and VT wins would sit in quad two. UVA becomes a nice resume headliner but obviously still leaves a lot of work to be done.

NC State would probably need to at least reach the ACC title game after that, and by then at least we’d have the ol’ hot-team-in-March narrative working for us a bit, what with State being on a nine-game winning streak by then. All we need to do to reach that point is dodge the extremely high improbability of it ever materializing—that doesn’t seem so tough, if you ask me.