It isn’t done just yet, but 100 percent of the current indications have it that LSU is about to usher in the glorious return of Will Wade as the school’s men’s basketball coach.

Will Wade met with NC State officials Wednesday evening as they made their pitch to keep the coach in Raleigh, source confirms.

The sides did not immediately agree on terms for Wade to remain at NC State, making a return to LSU feel imminent.

LSU would be willing to negotiate a…

— Matt Moscona (@MattMoscona) March 26, 2026

Truth be told, this should have happened last year, when the previous LSU administration had the opportunity to pack Matt McMahon off to whatever mid-major program would have him and bring Wade from McNeese State, where he’d engineered one of the most amazing turnarounds in modern college basketball history.

But the pieces weren’t in place to do it then. Gov. Jeff Landry, who has been a major booster of the idea to bring Wade back to LSU, was demanding it then, but then-president Bill Tate and then-athletic director Scott Woodward refused.

Tate then left for Rutgers and Woodward got himself fired in the fall when Brian Kelly flamed out as the football coach, leading to a $54 million liability for the athletic department and the university to navigate over the next six years.

LSU is stuck paying Woodward $200,000 per month, which seems like the most unjust buyout of all time seeing as though the coaching change he refused to make last year will cost between $3 million and $5 million in buying Wade out of his deal at NC State (if this can be strung along until April 1, the buyout drops from $5 million to $3 million; there may be some arrangement made in order to move things along). Woodward will end up costing LSU well more than $75 million in dead money racked up on buyouts for coaches (and athletic directors), which is a legendary amount of wasted resources.

And that’s one reason Wade is the hire to replace McMahon, who hasn’t officially been fired as of this writing (it’s likely to come down today). One thing which makes this a no-brainer for current athletic director Verge Ausberry is that Wade already has great relationships with money people in Louisiana from his first stint at LSU, which means he can pay for himself in terms of ticket sales and TAF contributions for things like NIL payments right off the bat. Doing a national search and bringing in someone with no connection to the school or the area might yield a better result long-term (or it might not), but that new coach will know nobody and he’d have to be provided with resources in order to compete.

With Wade, the coach can get on the horn and make calls to people he already knows to line up NIL payments and other monetary assets for the program.

And bringing in Heath Schroyer, the athletic director who hired Wade at McNeese State, as the assistant athletic director over basketball, gives the coach a champion in the athletic administration building that he never had when he was at LSU the first time. That became a major problem for him, as both Joe Alleva and Woodward held the FBI wiretap problem over Wade’s head as a means to deny him things that had been promised to him.

Principally, that men’s basketball would have a locker room/weight room/office facility within the same building as their practice floor. It drove Wade crazy that his players would have to walk across the street from the practice floor and the locker room to lift weights in Tiger Stadium or see coaches in the athletic administration building. But when he tried to get something done about that he was told it wasn’t in the cards because of his NCAA investigation that came from the FBI wiretap scandal.

Now there are plans for a new arena which would wash that problem away completely, though those will depend on the creation of a taxing district. That’s a lot easier sell with Wade coming back than it was with McMahon still the coach and lingering at the back of the SEC back.

It’s an interesting move, and one which should inject some hope into the LSU men’s basketball program which has been utterly moribund since Wade’s departure four years ago.

Is there anything for Wade to build on when he arrives here, presumably next week but perhaps sooner?

Well, the team’s best player this past season, point guard D.J. Thomas, is rumored to be hitting the transfer portal when it opens April 7. That might be Wade’s most important recruiting call. Center Mike Nwoko has a year of eligibility remaining; he’s a legitimate SEC player though Wade would need to teach him to defend without fouling. Freshman point guard Jalen Reece showed some flashes of being a quality player, and Wade has at times put two point guards on the floor at the same time so it’s possible he could keep both Thomas and Reece around if he chose.

Beyond that? Well…

6-10 post player Robert Miller is an LSU legacy; his parents were both LSU athletes. Miller got himself into disciplinary problems at the end of the season and was left home for the SEC Tournament game LSU lost to Kentucky. Miller has showed signs of becoming a good player in his first two seasons, but it’s never been consistent. Would Wade consider him as a reclamation project? Maybe. Another 6-10 player, freshman Matt Gilhool, sat out the season for medical reasons but was practicing by the end and was supposedly the best player on the team. That might augur for bringing him back. Marcus Vaughns, a 6-8 forward from Australia who signed with LSU last November, showed up for the spring semester and, like Gilhool, took a redshirt this year. Wade might bring Vaughns back.

But Max McKinnon, Marquel Sutton, Rashad King, Pablo Tamba and P.J. Carter have all used up their eligiblity. And it would be a big surprise of little-used guards Mazi Moseley and Ron Zipper, both of whom were freshmen, stuck around.

McMahon had two other November signees – 6-6 forward Kevin Thomas from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (ranked the #78 player in the country by 247 Sports) and 6-5 guard Herly Brutus from The Villages, Florida (#139) – and a commitment from 6-2 Australian guard Owen Foxwell. Whether any of that trio sticks with LSU is anybody’s guess.

What this means is Wade will be digging very deep into the transfer portal when it opens. It’s an excellent bet the Tigers’ 2026-27 roster will be made up mostly of players not currently associated with the program.

Which is fine. LSU needed a fresh start a year ago. Bringing Wade back is certainly an unusual move, but one which is very popular with a great deal of the fan base.

And Will Wade fits absolutely perfectly with the character of an athletic program built around coaches like Lane Kiffin, Kim Mulkey and Jay Johnson, who are aggressive recruiters, big personalities and tireless workers who don’t care if they’re liked by the blue bloods and the national media.

Wade isn’t liked. He’s never been liked. It’s part of his charm that he’s willing to stick his thumb in the eye of the blue bloods, but it was also his downfall in his first stint.

But things have changed. It was time to bring him home. And Wade Redux is going to be fascinating.