Last night, an 18-14 North Texas team came into the Pete Maravich Assembly Center and blew the doors off Matt McMahon’s LSU basketball Tigers in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament. The final margin was only seven points, 84-77, but that doesn’t reflect the game. LSU closed out the contest on a 15-4 garbage-time rally after the issue had been decided and what few fans bothered to attend had picked up and left.

That loss stuck a pin in the balloon that was the narrative of McMahon’s resurgence of LSU basketball. The Tigers had managed, after all, to go from two wins in SEC play in McMahon’s first season to nine this year – a .500 league record which exceeded expectations and demonstrated that McMahon is a capable floor coach.

And he is that. He wouldn’t have racked up the wins that he did at Murray State before coming to LSU if he wasn’t.

But everybody in the SEC is a good coach. You don’t get a job in this league unless you are. Every year, three or four coaches in the league are fired and all of them arrived at the schools sacking them with fantastic resumes. Most of them land elsewhere and have success at mid-major programs or even other programs in Power 6 conferences.

I want to be wrong about Matt McMahon. I’m not rooting for him to fail so I can say “I told you so.” McMahon failing, and creating the need for millions of dollars in buyout money so a new coach can be hired for LSU basketball to finally assume some semblance of respectable competitiveness, is a bad outcome. Rooting for bad outcomes makes you an idiot, or else a villain.

I want him to succeed.

But we’ve been through this many times with LSU basketball since Dale Brown faded into obsolescence in the mid 1990’s. LSU’s athletic department has racked up a terrible record of managing the program in that time, and as such the fortunes of the men’s basketball team have been like a yo-yo for 30 years.

And that’s being charitable.

The problem that McMahon has run into, at least where it comes to building his program, is that he’s up against the shadow of Will Wade, whom he replaced a couple of years ago.

On internet message boards, social media and radio talk shows you’ll hear a constant back-and-forth among LSU fans who have devolved into warring camps. There are those who think Wade was unjustly terminated over actions he took which were, but are no longer, recruiting violations that landed him in media reports about FBI wiretaps, and then there are those who think Wade is indefensible because of those actions.

Emblematic of them are that Wade was using his wife’s bank account to pay players. In modern parlance, you’d do the same thing by contributing to LSU’s NIL fund. Which several coaches on LSU’s campus are doing.

I don’t know that McMahon is one of them.

That McNeese State hired Wade last summer to take over its moribund men’s hoops program, and he’s taken McNeese from a 23-loss team last year to 32-3 and a spot in the NCAA Tournament this year, is the worst possible result McMahon could have seen. There is now no escaping the comparisons to Wade, and McMahon isn’t just up against the parallel accomplishments Wade managed at various stages of his time at LSU but now he’s up against the success Wade is having at McNeese.

After two years, you’d like to say that McMahon is climbing out of those problems. When he took over the LSU program all of the players and all of the signees left, leaving him for a short time without a single scholarship player.

And McMahon’s defenders point that out all the time. The problem is, it’s not really all that accurate a description of the circumstances.

Three of the players who had been on LSU’s 2022 roster – Mwani Wilkinson, Adam Miller and Justice Williams – pulled out of the transfer portal to stick with McMahon. And four players, three current players (K.J. Williams, Trae Hannibal and Justice Hill) and a signee (Cornelius Williams), came with him from Murray State. Yes, for a brief few days he had no players, but what’s more accurate would be to say he had seven.

The problem is that other than K.J. Williams and, later, Hannibal, none of these guys are any good. Cornelius Williams redshirted last season and then left when it was obvious he was never going to play at LSU (he averaged 3.5 points and 3 rebounds per game at Western Carolina this season), Justice Williams had an awful sophomore season last year and then left for Robert Morris, where ha averaged 12 points a game this year, Adam Miller actively lost games for LSU last season by shooting the Tigers into oblivion and he’s now doing the same thing for Arizona State, Justice Hill flaked out during the season last year (he’s now at Loyola Marymount where he averaged 11 points a game this year) and Wilkinson has barely gotten off the bench for McMahon in two years at LSU.

The other six players McMahon recruited that first year haven’t been a lot better.

Derek Fountain has been a so-so part-time starter, but nothing about Fountain’s game indicates that he’s going to break out into a great SEC player. Shawn Phillips sat the bench most of last year and then transferred to Arizona State, where he averaged five points and three rebounds a game this year. Cam Hayes showed little flashes of good play and then he got hurt, played terribly the second half of the season and then transferred to East Carolina, where he averaged seven points a game on a bad team this year.

Then there are Jalen Reed and Tyrell Ward, who were two of LSU’s main rotation players this year and on whom McMahon’s hopes of a resurgence in the program rest. Ward averaged nine points a game this year and Reed averaged eight, and between them and true freshman Mike Williams (seven points a game this year) McMahon can look at three players who ought to at least factor as rotational pieces, if not starters, on next year’s team.

Ward is a legitimate outside shooter, though the rest of his game is average. On a good team he’d be a three-point bomber off the bench. Williams is a decent third guard on a good team; he has a good outside shot, at times he’ll play defense and he can handle the ball a little (though not enough to be a point guard in the SEC). As for Reed, at times he’ll look like a promising SEC big man. And at other times you’ll wonder what on earth is going on inside his head.

None of these kids are stars. There is no Tremont Waters, Skylar Mays, Jevonte Smart or Trendon Watford to build around. McMahon hasn’t recruited anybody like that.

The two high school players he has coming in for next year, 6-10 forward Robert Miller and 6-3 guard Curtis Givens, are very nice-looking recruits. Right now McMahon needs them to be ready to start right away and actually lead the team.

Because all of the leaders from the 17-16 team which met its end at the hands of North Texas last night are gone.

Jordan Wright was LSU’s best player for most of the season. He’s out of eligibility. Maybe Ward can replace Wright’s 15 points a game, though there are rumors, which Ward has yet to dispel, that he’s going to hit the transfer portal.

Jalen Cook actually led LSU in scoring, but Cook has to be considered as an utter bust as LSU’s marquee transfer addition. He only played in 13 games, some of which owing to the NCAA denying his eligibility according to the transfer rules before a federal judge tossed out those rules on second-time transfers, but then Cook had a “hamstring injury” which ultimately turned into a suspension. The inside word was that he refused to play; that made him the second highly-touted point guard in as many seasons to flake on McMahon.

Seeing as though McMahon’s reputation as a coach was built on turning Ja Morant into a sensation at point guard, this is more than a little perplexing.

Will Baker was another big portal addition this year. His numbers (11 points, five rebounds per game) weren’t awful, but Baker was the Invisible Man basically every time LSU ran into a team with a significant post presence. He has to be considered a bust, but he’s gone in any event. Hunter Dean, a local kid from Slidell who had been at Southern Miss and George Washington before turning up as something of an afterthought in last year’s transfer class, was actually the most inspiring player of the bunch given the toughness and effort he played with. But Dean is also out of eligibility.

So is Hannibal.

Can McMahon get anything out of the three other players who were on the bench this year after mid-December? The word is that Carlos Stewart, a bust out of the transfer portal who came highly thought of from Santa Clara but averaged just 4.7 points a game on dismal 33 percent field goal shooting before going down with a knee injury, is leaving. Daimion Collins, a Kentucky transfer who showed off a little athleticism before hurting a shoulder and taking a medical redshirt this year, appears to be staying, but Collins, a former five-star recruit out of high school, can best be described as an enigma. Then there’s Corey Chest, a 6-8 freshman forward who redshirted this year. That he redshirted on this team isn’t the best resume item considering how weak LSU’s talent was; one wonders whether Chest will stick around.

That’s it. That’s what McMahon has brought in. At best, before he tries to cobble his roster together for next year, he’s returning a post rotation of Fountain, Reed, Collins, Chest and Miller and a backcourt of Ward, Williams and Givens.

This assumes all of the above players are staying. Which isn’t necessary a valid assumption.

McMahon’s strategy on transfers focused on bringing home Louisiana players who were at other schools. That’s what Wright, Cook, Stewart and Dean were. The problem is there aren’t any Louisiana products out there who would even play at that level right now given how badly the state has fallen as a basketball hotbed over the past few years.

So McMahon now has to find five, or probably six, legitimate SEC players, at least three of whom are capable of starting and playing well in the league, with no apparent advantage to draw from other than playing time.

And he’ll have to do it despite LSU having, apparently, the worst NIL war chest in the SEC. Which is a product of McMahon’s inability so far to raise any money for that war chest.

Nothing about any of this points to future success. It points to a moribund program which might actually have hit its ceiling under McMahon.

I want to be wrong about this, mind you. But the problem is that firing Wade, rightly or wrongly, conferred a responsibility on LSU athletic director Scott Woodward to build a program that could perform at least as well as Wade was performing at LSU. So far that isn’t happening, and to make it happen it’s looking more and more like he’ll have to pay a big buyout to McMahon and hire yet another coach who can put the program back on the map.

And in a year’s time, when the lackluster roster yields lackluster success and the pressure builds to do something, there will be a sizable groundswell among the fans to hire Wade back – because if LSU doesn’t do that and Wade lands at another SEC school, which could very easily happen, you will then have a Nick Saban-style ghost haunting LSU in basketball.

Nothing about this is very much fun, and that’s a shame. Not long ago LSU basketball was beginning to look like it had a future. Somebody has to address the situation to get the program back to that point, and soon.