The last time we waded into the subject of LSU basketball and its status as the sick man of the university’s athletic department, the word had been put out in mid-February that athletic director Scott Woodward wanted to shovel a pile of money into McMahon’s hands for use in buying a better team through NIL next year.

We weren’t overly sanguine about the prospects of that plan for success.

What we noted was that McMahon’s recruiting classes have generally been ranked highly enough that LSU should be competitive within the SEC and getting to the NCAA Tournament. Instead, his recruits consistently underperform. It almost seems like McMahon specializes in signing the kids the recruiting services like but other coaches won’t touch, and then when they get to LSU we find out why.

LSU’s teams don’t play particularly hard, they consistently get outrebounded, they can’t run offensive sets, they shoot horribly, he’s yet to find a point guard after three years who isn’t a turnover machine, in three years it’s hard to find more than a handful of games against quality opposition where LSU has played legitimately good defense, and game management is terrible.

This isn’t like the early days of watching John Brady coach LSU, where it was clear the program didn’t have a quality SEC roster but they were a tough out nonetheless. And it certainly isn’t like watching Will Wade’s early years, when the program was rapidly restocked with high-level talent that showed out immediately on the way to making LSU relevant again.

Yes, Will Wade’s name is going to show up in this post. It’s impossible not to talk about Wade in a discussion of LSU basketball right now. Wade’s McNeese State team just finished an easy run through the Southland Conference, breezing through the conference tournament on their way to the NCAA Big Dance with a sparkling 27-6 overall record, including a 19-1 conference mark and a current 11-game win streak. Since Wade was hired at McNeese, a program which was 11-23 the year before he showed up has now gone 57-10 in two years with two NCAA tournament appearances. It’s one of the most amazing turnarounds in the history of college basketball, and that’s not a hyperbolic statement.

If Wade had no connection to LSU, he would be a no-brainer replacement for Matt McMahon and we’d be expecting news of McMahon’s ouster and Wade’s hiring sometime next week.

But there is that connection to LSU, and there is the history of Wade being let go for the recruiting violations unearthed in FBI wiretaps while he was winning 105 games in five seasons. It’s very difficult to imagine LSU hiring Wade back, and there are now rumors he’s headed to North Carolina State to replace the fired Kevin Keatts as the coach there.

Maybe that’s for the best, because LSU’s fan base has been tearing itself apart over Wade’s firing for the last three years while McMahon has utterly failed.

And boy, has he failed.

In Matt McMahon’s three years as LSU’s head basketball coach…

• He has the fewest SEC wins (14) of any team in the league not counting brand-new Texas and Oklahoma. That’s five less wins than the second-worst team in the league. At 14-40 in SEC play, that’s a .259 winning percentage. When your winning percentage as a basketball coach would be a bad batting average in baseball, it’s a bad sign.
• McMahon is now 45-53 overall as LSU’s head coach. For reference, the two coaches before Wade, both of whom were either fired or left for another job in advance of being fired, had records of 49-48 (Trent Johnson) and 61-37 (Johnny Jones), and it was fairly obvious in both of those cases that neither were top-level basketball men after three years.
• McMahon has the worst conference road record in the SEC, 4-23, during his time here.
• He’s 1-4 in post-season play, including a 1-3 record in the SEC tournament with almost a 17 point average margin of defeat in those 3 losses. Add that to an 84-77 home loss to North Texas in the NIT last year and McMahon is the worst-performing postseason coach in LSU history.
• McMahon owns the cumulative lowest NET ranking in the conference.
• He also owns the cumulative lowest KenPom rating in the conference
• With Georgia’s impending bid to the NCAA Tournament this year, McMahon will be the only one of the six SEC coaches hired ahead of the 22-23 season to not reach the tournament – and he hasn’t even had LSU on the NCAA bubble past the first week of February in any of his three seasons.
• And then there are the records against other SEC schools…
  • 0-5 vs. Alabama
  • 0-5 vs Mississippi St
  • 0-3 vs Auburn
  • 0-3 vs Tennessee
  • 0-3 vs Florida
  • 1-3 vs Ole Miss
  • 1-5 vs Texas A&M

We could go on and on in describing this futility.

But perhaps the worst number is that since it came out on February 17 that LSU was contemplating giving McMahon another year and directing NIL money into his program in order to boost his recruiting prospects, this is how he’s performed…

So a nice little win against the worst team in the conference which won only two conference games all year, and then an ugly six-game losing streak which carried an average margin of defeat of 17.7 points.

Yes, those games were all against NCAA tournament teams and yes, five of the six opponents were ranked (and Mississippi State has been ranked for much of the year). So what? That’s the league LSU is in. The question to ask is, why isn’t LSU ranked?

After three years, you can answer that with “Well, McMahon doesn’t have enough NIL money.” Why doesn’t he have it? What’s he doing to raise it?

And more to the point, why isn’t he getting more out of what he has?

LSU’s NIL budget for basketball is more than a lot of teams who’ll be making the NCAA Tournament on Sunday. But when some of your most talented players aren’t even bothering to play – Corey Chest and Vyctorious Miller weren’t even on the bench for last night’s 31-point blowout loss to Mississippi State Wednesday night and Tyrell Ward quit the team before the season even started, continuing a pattern of a half-dozen players expected to play major roles on McMahon’s teams who have quit on him over the past three years – does it matter how much NIL money he gets?

He isn’t generating his own NIL budget, he isn’t keeping the players who are drawing NIL money, the players he has underperform and don’t play particularly hard, his teams have poor fundamentals and consistently make mistakes…what’s the justification for keeping him?

We all know the justification. Woodward and the LSU Powers That Be aren’t interested in investing resources into men’s basketball, and to fire McMahon would be to eat something on the order of $7 million worth of buyout money. Worse, firing McMahon while Wade was still in play – that is to say, before another Power Four conference school snaps him up and takes him off the potential hiring board – would subject the athletic department to a barrage of fans demanding that he be hired back.

So it’s a money thing and a pride thing. What it isn’t is a competitive-excellence thing, and that’s the problem.

Did Wade make mistakes which cost him his job at LSU? Sure. He made the biggest one of all by getting caught doing what Bill Self and Mike Krzyzewski were doing, which ironically enough are things which are legal now. In truth, hiring Wade back might not actually be what LSU needs. There are always going to be LSU basketball fans and boosters who will think poorly of Wade because he’s branded as a cheater, and because of that he might never be able to unite the fan base behind his program in a way that someone else starting fresh might.

The ideal move would be to find an established major-college winner who isn’t happy with his current circumstances or is getting stale where he is. A Brian Kelly for basketball, perhaps. Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, who was highly successful at Clemson and then at Texas before getting stale in Austin and has re-emerged with an utterly elite program now, is a great model for what LSU really needs.

But who is that guy now? This, I can’t answer. I have a feeling that if LSU were to approach Mick Cronin at UCLA with a big-money offer, he’ll listen, if for no other reason than that the travel UCLA’s basketball team has to endure to play in a coast-to-coast league like the Big Ten is now has to be highly unappealing. But Cronin doesn’t exactly coach a high-flying, exciting brand of basketball. You’ve got to really appreciate defense and physical play to want to watch his teams. Maybe that’s what LSU fans would take to; one thing about Cronin is that he will win, and ultimately that’s all anybody cares about.

All of this appears academic, of course. So far it looks like LSU’s fans are stuck with another year of McMahon’s futility. A fat wad of NIL cash won’t likely fix that; everybody else will be throwing money around, too, and what makes anyone think McMahon can attract winning players after going 3-15 in the SEC?

It’s a bad plan. Woodward needs another plan. And while re-hiring Wade might not be the best idea available, what won’t work at all is the likely scenario in which McMahon absorbs several million dollars in NIL welfare money and blows it on more underperforming players who quit as he finishes at the bottom of the league while Wade heads off to NC State and puts them into the NCAA Tournament in his first year there.

Which is exactly what we expect to happen.

The question then becomes, particularly if something happens and Kelly doesn’t make the football playoffs in his fourth year since Woodward hired him, whether LSU has the right athletic director.

Woodward’s seat isn’t hot yet. Staying with an abject failure of a coach in the second-most important program in his department is a good way to get there.