PROVIDENCE — McNeese State coach Will Wade is taking a refreshing approach to rumors about the Coaching Carousel.
Wade has been heavily linked to the coaching opening at N.C. State and was asked about it here ahead of his No. 12-seeded team’s first-round NCAA Tournament game Thursday with No. 5 Clemson.
Asked if anyone close to him had spoken to N.C. State, Wade smiled and said, “Yes.”
The ACC school fired former coach Kevin Keatts on March 9, one year after he led the school to a Final Four.
Wade, 42, has been linked to the opening since then, along with Tennessee associate head coach Justin Gainey, a former N.C. State guard.
Wade, who was fired by LSU amid the FBI investigation into bribery in college basketball before he resurfaced at McNeese in 2023, says his approach is to be straightforward with his players and the media about his coaching plans.
“Just tell it like it is,” he said. “You may not always like what I’m going to say, but I’m going to tell you what I think. I’ve always kind of been like that, and there’s no need to hide it. The guys are reading it on social media. It’s no secret. I’m not going to ask them to do something I’m not willing to do. It’s no good if you don’t address it and if you sit there and BS them. They can read right through the BS, so you might as well, hey, this is what it is. Here we are, and we’ll figure it out.”
Wade said he’s talked to his players about his own plans and their plans to potentially enter the transfer portal.
“I told our coaching staff last year I don’t want to hear any complaining about calling kids in the portal while we’re in the NCAA Tournament,” Wade said. “Half the coaching staffs in the country — those assistants are trying to get other jobs, too. If they’re trying to get other jobs, why can’t the kids? That makes intuitive sense to me. I think it’s moving in a good direction with the revenue share, and I haven’t followed it all that closely. I know there’s going to be a clearinghouse with the NIL deals so it seems positive. We’re going to share the revenue and make sure the NIL is actually NIL, for the most part. I think it’s moving in a good direction.”
Wade is one of several coaches here whose schools were involved in the FBI investigation into bribery during the recruiting process that resulted in several federal trials in Manhattan in 2019.
Kansas coach Bill Self and then-Louisville coach Rick Pitino were also linked to the investigation. Wade ended up getting fired by LSU in 2022 and Pitino was fired by Louisville in 2017 before heading to Greece and then returning to coach at Iona and St. John’s.
Of course, paying players is now completely legal under Name, Image and Likeness rules, and St. John’s, for example, has a $4 million payroll this season.
In 2023, Wade received a two-year show-cause penalty and a 10-game suspension for multiple rules violations.
The ruling came from a panel of the Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP). It determined Wade failed to report potential violations, as well as making payments to the ex-fiancée of a former player — who he had coached before arriving at LSU in 2017 — to prevent the disclosure of potential violations.
Additionally, the panel found Wade failed to cooperate with the investigation running from December 2018 to August 2021, specifically by delaying full production of requested records and knowingly providing false or misleading information.
As for how the landscape has changed between the FBI investigation and the arrival of NIL, Wade said: “I think it’s evolving. It doesn’t affect us as much at McNeese as it does at other places, but I think it’s slowly evolving, unfortunately, through the courts.
“It would have been better, probably, if it was done not kind of piecemealed through the courts like we have now. If we had a little foresight on some things. But I’m all for the student-athletes having opportunities and having the ability to move around.”
(The AP contributed reporting.)
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Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter and Basketball Insider for NJ Advance Media. You may follow him on Twitter @AdamZagoria and check out his Website at ZAGSBLOG.com.
