Several reports on the LSU websites popped yesterday with the news that despite a 13-12 record and an awful 2-10 SEC mark, Matt McMahon is going to be back to coach men’s basketball next year.

New: LSU is backing Matt McMahon with a focus on building basketball's NIL budget, sources tell me.

LSU + South Carolina had the least NIL money in the offseason. Both are at the bottom of the SEC standings.

My story on LSU's approach + what's next:➡️ https://t.co/KLVJVBwauP pic.twitter.com/NUMrkCMrSp

— Shea Dixon (@Sheadixon) February 17, 2025

The word on the street is that the LSU athletic department will boost McMahon’s NIL budget from its current $1.5 million up to $8 million next year, which presumably would give him enough money to buy up three or four legitimate pro prospects and put the program on something akin to a competitive level.

When you consider that between LSU and South Carolina, the two lowest NIL budgets in the SEC for men’s hoops, there are only two conference wins between them – it’ll become three tonight, as the Gamecocks will be in Baton Rouge for the battle of the basement – there’s an argument to be made for a direct correlation. The best teams in the league have NIL budgets of $6-10 million, and through the first 12 games of SEC play it’s pretty obvious NIL money is a factor.

LSU has one player who clearly belongs on the court with the Alabamas, Auburns, Tennessees and Floridas of the world. That would be Cam Carter, who took over the Oklahoma game Saturday night and won it pretty much by himself. But Carter is a senior and he’s out of here next year. He’s the only player in McMahon’s three years coaching at LSU who can even sniff the door of an NBA locker room.

So the lack of NIL money is the problem and everything gets fixed by dumping a pallet of money outside of McMahon’s office.

Right?

Well, maybe. But maybe not.

What we can say in favor of this move is it’s a signal – really the first one in several years – that the LSU athletic department gives a fig about men’s basketball. Right or wrong, recognizing that a paltry $1.5 million in NIL money when there are teams spending five times that much will absolutely not keep up with the SEC’s Joneses is a step toward caring about winning. And it’s presumably a lot cheaper to drop $8 million worth of bait in the water to see if enough fish bite to take a team to the NCAA tournament next year.

It’s at least something. It’s also a recognition that McMahon hasn’t been working with a lot since he got to campus. Prime the pump a little and we’ll see what happens.

But here’s why we’re not sold on this being the fix they’re claiming.

Despite the fact LSU’s talent level on the court has been pretty obviously deficient compared to the better teams in the SEC, recruiting hasn’t really been McMahon’s worst problem since he got to Tigertown. He’s consistently rated in the top 20 nationally, and in the top half of the SEC, for his recruiting classes. The problem isn’t that he’s recruiting a bunch of scrubs, but rather that his 4-star recruits keep playing like scrubs.

For example, the current freshman class has three Top 100 recruits in it. But Robert Miller, who was rated the No. 81 player in the country by 247 Sports, is averaging all of 3.3 points and 2.5 rebounds a game. Vyctorius Miller (No. 85), is a bit better, averaging 9.1 points a game, and he’s perhaps McMahon’s next pro prospect – assuming he doesn’t flee to the transfer portal. But Curtis Givens (No. 84) was probably the most important of the three seeing as though LSU desperately needed a point guard, and that hasn’t worked well at all; Givens is averaging 4.7 points a game, he’s shooting a catastrophic 27.7 percent from the floor and 25.3 percent from the three point line, and his assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.6-1.1 is terrible.

Givens’ troubles are compounded by the fact that the other point guard McMahon recruited, senior transfer Jordan Sears, is shooting just 37.5 percent from the floor and his assist-to-turnover ratio is 2.6-2.3. Sears has been relegated basically to a sixth-man role of late because he’s too small and too slow to handle SEC competition, and he isn’t making up for that by draining three-pointers like he did when he led the Ohio Valley Conference in scoring at UT-Martin last year. There were several SEC schools who offered Sears and McMahon got him; then he turned out not to be very good.

Last year LSU only signed a couple of high school players in Corey Chest (No. 97) and Mike Williams N0. 119). Chest redshirted last year and he’s been good at times this year, averaging 6.6 points, 7.3 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game. But he’s an almost comically bad shooter, his basketball IQ leaves a lot to be desired at times and he fouls way too much. There’s talent to work with where Chest is concerned, but frankly it’s disconcerting to watch him regress over the course of the season. As for Williams, he played more last year than this year and the stats show why – he’s averaging 2.7 points a game on 27.7 percent floor shooting (22.2 percent from the three-point line) and his assist-to-turnover ratio of 0.8-0.6 is putrid.

We could go on. In short, the problem isn’t that McMahon can’t find four-star recruits to staff that team with. He brings in kids from the high schools and the transfer portal who have resumes. And then they get to LSU and don’t perform.

When they’re on the court at all.

Four times in three years McMahon has had an expected star player essentially quit the team, something which almost never happens in college basketball but is a consistent pattern throughout his time on campus. His first year it was Justice Hill, the point guard he brought with him from Murray State who had been an all-conference player and looked like a capable SEC floor general. Hill was so bad through non-conference play that he stepped away from basketball for a few weeks, and when he came back he was no factor as the team finished near the bottom of the conference standings.

Then last year he had Jalen Cook, who was a 20-point-per-game scorer at Tulane and supposedly the fix at point guard; Cook missed the first 10 games of the season with eligibility issues, then took the court as one of the most egregious ball hogs in program history, then suffered a minor injury that he decided he didn’t want to play on for the last month of the season. Another transfer guard, Carlos Stewart, who like Cook hailed from the Baton Rouge area and had been an all-conference performer at Santa Clara, similarly leveraged a minor injury into an effective departure from the team.

And this year Tyrell Ward, the leading returning scorer from last year’s team and the most consistent outside shooter in the program, up and quit during preseason practice.

A pattern like this doesn’t really get fixed with more NIL money. McMahon’s locker room and program vibe are problematic. It looks like this year’s team plays hard, at least some of the time, but they’re anything but cohesive and they go from fighting over the ball to refusing to take charge of the offense over the course of games.

But the big question we’ve got about keeping McMahon and throwing the $8 million (or whatever the number is) in NIL money at him is, what next?

Let’s say McMahon grabs that money, locks down Chest, the two Millers, junior big man Jalen Reed who was headed toward a good season this year before he blew out his knee, and the three recruits he’s already signed for next year (247 has shooting guard Mazi Mosley as the No. 71 player in the country, point guard Jalen Reece as No. 78 and forward Matt Gilhool as No. 89), and then goes out and picks up five or six quality additions from the transfer portal. Let’s say he finally manages to keep his team from falling apart during the season and let’s say he’s able to do with that crew what he was able to do in his second year, which is to finish at .500 in the SEC.

Let’s say that’s enough to get to the NCAA Tournament. You’d call this a win, right?

But what comes after that?

Men’s basketball made a million dollars for the athletic program last year. Whether it makes that much this year is sort of doubtful. They haven’t had anything like a full house this season and there won’t be any postseason money. Now you’re kicking in another $6-7 million to run the NIL budget up to $8 million – and we don’t know if this is outside money the athletic department has secured from boosters, or if it’s general resource money from the athletic program. The point is, you’re probably losing money on men’s basketball next year even getting to the tournament.

Because what we do know is that Matt McMahon is not raising that NIL money. He hasn’t done it in the three years he’s been at LSU and he isn’t doing it now. Maybe he’ll suddenly get good at generating his own NIL budget, but there’s no reason to count on that.

Will the athletic department commit to priming the pump year after year so that McMahon can finish in the middle of the SEC pack and make the tournament as a bubble team?

Because unless the coach is able to go out and hustle the kind of cash from boosters that would make LSU a destination for not the No. 81 player in the country but the No. 11 or No. 1 player, and sell his program to the big-money boosters so as to put some glitz and atmosphere into the PMAC for big games against marquee teams inside and outside the SEC, the No. 2 revenue sport in college athletics will operate as a non-revenue sport at LSU – and forever struggle just to avoid seasons like the one the school is suffering through now.

Essentially, what they’re doing is investing McMahon’s contract buyout money into an NIL budget in hopes that he’ll prove he doesn’t need to be let go. And maybe this ends up being a good move, in that McMahon might leverage that mother’s milk into a team good enough to build a narrative that he’s “turned around” the program, and that makes him marketable to some other school. This was the scenario that Trent Johnson parlayed out of LSU when he left for TCU, and it saved the athletic department some money on a buyout (and then-AD Joe Alleva proceeded to hire Johnny Jones, which was an unmitigated disaster).

But honestly, that’s the best scenario we can imagine. After watching this program for three years, what we don’t envision is that sizable bump in NIL money makes LSU a contender in the SEC and a team capable of a deep run in the NCAA dance next year and this somehow leads to sustained success with McMahon as the coach. Nothing in what we’ve seen tells us he’s going to somehow blossom into a Bruce Pearl or Rick Barnes with an infusion of cash into his program.

And we don’t take any pleasure in being naysayers here, nor do we get any joy out of saying the smart move is to make a coaching change. We don’t dislike McMahon personally. He seems like a nice guy.

But when Jay Johnson hustles his own NIL money to make LSU Baseball a 900-pound gorilla, and Brian Kelly is said to fly around in planes and helicopters meeting with big-money players to chase down NIL checks (and putting a million dollars of his own money into the football NIL war chest), and we see McMahon spending the offseason riding around in a golf cart passing out donuts to students on campus, the impression we get is he’s better off in a lot less pressure-packed environment than the SEC offers and LSU needs a much more ambitious and aggressive coach if the program is going to compete at the level it needs to.

We’ll see who gets proven right out of this. In the meantime, it’s going to be the same coach next year, for better or worse.