Will Wade Is Funny. The Roster Is a Problem.

Game night in a packed arena. Photo: The-Lore, Unsplash

Will Wade stepped up to the podium at the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge on Wednesday and thanked Cindy for the introduction, specifically for leaving out the part where he got fired.

“Left off the part where I got fired, so it was good,” Wade said. “Appreciate that.”

The crowd, a lot of it dressed in purple and gold, had a good laugh. That was the warm-up.

A quick refresher for anyone who stopped paying attention in 2022. Wade won an SEC regular-season title in 2019, then got caught on an FBI wiretap discussing an offer to a recruit. LSU fired him in March 2022 after the NCAA sent the school a notice of allegations. The NCAA later ruled that he offered inducements to recruits and hit him with a show-cause penalty. He won 50 games in two seasons at McNeese, spent one year at NC State, and then left NC State by way of an email from his agent (the athletic director said that’s how he found out) to take the LSU job back. LSU fired Matt McMahon to make room. Wade became the first SEC men’s basketball coach fired and rehired by the same school.

That is a lot of material for one introduction, and he was just getting started.

“A lot’s changed since the first time I was here,” Wade told the room. “There’s two massive changes. First off, the first big change is I’m no longer the most controversial coach on campus. I’ve been happy to kind of pass that along.”

The coach he passed it to is Lane Kiffin, who left Ole Miss for LSU football right before the Rebels’ playoff run, and who got sued by the SEC in September over his effort to put former NFL players on his roster (an effort he has since dropped). The same Rotary Club presented Kiffin with a peace pole on wheels in July, so Wade was following an act with a prop.

The second change was NIL. “We were just a little bit ahead of our time with NIL.”

I think that one is hilarious, and it works because it is partly true. Players get paid openly now. It was also against the rules when Wade was doing it, and the NCAA made him pay for it. Wade knows that, the room knows that, and he said it anyway. This is part of the fun of college basketball. A coach can get fired, get rehired, and still get the biggest laugh in the room.

Now the part that isn’t funny.

LSU’s roster has been the story of the offseason. A week before the McNeese exhibition, the team’s official website listed four players. Wade had recruited a lot of others, including pros from overseas leagues, and plenty of them were still working through eligibility. The SEC has rules about players with professional experience, and Wade has said LSU will abide by what the league tells it to abide by. It is still an uncomfortable echo for a coach whose first stint ended over what he was and wasn’t allowed to offer.

On Wednesday, Wade said he expected about eight players to be available against McNeese, three of them essentially walk-ons. Then LSU played seven.

The Tigers beat McNeese 63-60 on Thursday night in Lake Charles. I’ll take the win, but it was close the whole way. Neither team led by more than six, LSU’s starters played almost the entire game, and the Tigers never put together a run to put the Cowboys away. That was against Wade’s old team, now coached by his former assistant Bill Armstrong, led by a freshman, Larry Johnson, who scored 22.

If that game is any indication of what is coming, this team might not do so hot in the SEC or outside of it. LSU went 3-15 in the conference last season, and nothing about this roster stands out. I think there is a really high chance it is terrible, and I can see a version of this year where it doesn’t win a single SEC game. Wade has had success everywhere he has coached, so I am curious how many wins he squeezes out of it. I just wouldn’t plan on a lot.

The regular season starts November 3 against LSU New Orleans. Gonzaga is on the road November 14, and Houston is December 13. If the roster is still this thin by then, I would like to hear what Wade has to say about it at the next Rotary Club.