There are five games left in the regular season, and Matt McMahon’s LSU men’s basketball team – which is currently 14-12 and 2-11 in the SEC, tied for last place in the conference standings – isn’t likely to be favored in any of them. It’s a program which is utterly moribund, capable of looking good at times while losing respectably on days when they aren’t utterly incompetent and getting humiliated.

Either way, they don’t win. They almost never win.

It’s the fourth year McMahon has been the coach of this team, and they’ve been mired at the bottom of the conference standings in three of the four seasons. In McMahon’s second year the team managed a 9-9 conference record and a trip to the NIT, which led to a first-round smacking at the hands of North Texas; LSU hasn’t been remotely relevant since.

It’s obvious McMahon needs to go. It’s hard to imagine he won’t be fired.

Except making it happen, if you’re LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry, isn’t as easy as you think. And there are now rumors that the university is considering keeping McMahon around for another year. Which isn’t likely, but the current four-game losing streak (and seven losses in the last eight games) should have put paid to any notions of McMahon keeping his job and yet what’s being tossed around is that he might.

Why?

Changing men’s basketball coaches is going to cost more than $30 million before it’s all said and done. And this comes after LSU just spent something on the order of $75 million on personnel changes in football and in the athletic director’s office.

That’s an awful lot of money to be spending in the space of one year.

Brian Kelly’s buyout was $54 million, though it’s being paid in installments of $800,000 per month. LSU owes fired former athletic director  Scott Woodward, whose bad hires and terrible contracts in football and men’s basketball have created this problem, another $200,000 per month.

To fire McMahon and his assistants and buy out their contracts will cost $10 million, though it can be paid out over the next three years.

To bring in a new coach will entail a $20 million commitment over the next four or five years, especially when including the assistant coaches. Which will probably include paying for a contract buyout.

LSU is currently shelling out $9 million on this current basketball roster – $3 million of which is athletic department revenue sharing and $6 million is NIL money. It’s thought that another $3-5 million will have to be found to back a commitment for the next head coach.

How much of this is an up-front expense? Well, a third of McMahon’s $10 million, all of the NIL increase, whatever it’ll cost to buy the new coach out of his contract and whatever salary increase you’re committing to in order to lure him to LSU, not to mention whatever the new coach’s assistants will cost. That could easily be a $15 million financial hit.

Can LSU absorb it? Probably.

Were it not for the dead weight of Kelly and Woodward, this would be an easy lift for the athletic department. But changing out both of Woodward’s major hires in the same year as Woodward himself is now bleeding the athletic department under the terms of his own contract buyout is a lot.

Ausberry needs help if he’s going to actually fix men’s basketball.

And the problem is that the program is in such terrible shape from the standpoint of community support – fan attendance and more importantly, donor/booster contributions – that attracting a coach becomes hard to do.

Not impossible, mind you. Ausberry can sell the fact that LSU’s fan base for football, baseball, women’s basketball and gymnastics is as robust as any in the country if not unparalleled. Building a rabid base of fan and booster support for men’s basketball is quite doable. Dale Brown did it; Will Wade was beginning to do it when Woodward fired him over the FBI wiretap issue four years ago. But the problem is that you’re starting from scratch and it’s going to take a promoter as much as a coach to rebuild.

And McMahon, a nice guy with a very bland personality, little magnetism and even less fire, who has demonstrated zero talent or understanding for the major college game and what’s necessary to succeed on a high level, has burned down all of what Wade was able to build.

If LSU can replace McMahon the right way, the next coach will be someone who can cultivate a strong base of donors who aren’t currently giving support to men’s basketball. It doesn’t do much good if he’s simply cannibalizing football donors. If it’s going to cost $8-10 million in NIL money to put a competitive men’s basketball roster together which can make the NCAA Tournament every year with a chance to do some damage in the Big Dance, that takes backers who are bought in not just to the purple and gold but to the coach himself.

This is one reason Wade’s name keeps coming back up as a potential hire. The fact that Wade has turned around NC State in his first year and has them 19-8 and 10-4 in the ACC merely solidifies his desirability for an LSU return. But hiring Wade away from Raleigh likely entails a bidding war with his current employer.

Beyond Wade, there’s little point in changing out McMahon for a coach who isn’t in high demand. For example, Josh Scherz at St. Louis, who’s an outstanding coach with an excellent resume (but who has yet to coach a team in the NCAA Tournament, something he’ll surely do this year; his team is currently 24-2 and atop the Atlantic 10 standings), is going to be pursued by multiple Power 4 conference schools and will be able to write his own contract. It would probably cost the better part of $4 million per year to hire him.

Scherz would be a marketable hire who’d get people excited, but he’s not a “big name” coach. Fred Hoiberg at Nebraska and T.J. Otzelberger at Iowa State would better fit that bill. Both would be hugely expensive.

And any of these guys would likely remedy the NIL situation… over time. LSU – and the Tiger Athletic Foundation specifically – would have to front the $8-10 million for next year’s team as a condition of attracting the new coach, in hopes that as he settles in and makes the local contacts he needs he’ll begin paying for himself later.

The point being that you’re hearing these noises about not firing McMahon because the money isn’t in place to make this change so soon after the giant investment was made in dumping Kelly for Lane Kiffin and giving Kiffin the NIL ammunition to put a championship roster together.

And Ausberry isn’t going to publicly, or even much privately, because the rumor mill will turn private into public in no time flat, pass the collection plate around until the end of the season. It’ll be another three weeks before we’re at that point.

So if you have the means to make a dent in this problem and you’re tired of LSU having the worst basketball team in the SEC, you now have the information you need to understand the challenge. Maybe you can help to solve it.

But without that help, making any positive change to the disaster Woodward created at the PMAC is going to be very, very hard.