LAKE CHARLES, La. — At about 9 o’clock last Wednesday night, Will Wade, whose college coaching career theoretically ended two years ago, plopped down atop a stool at Mr. Bill’s Seafood Express, a joint that, like this town, theoretically ceased to exist three-and-half years ago. The place was packed. Tables covered in crawfish and shrimp. Foam cups filled with margaritas. A bunch of locals mixed among family members of the McNeese State Cowboys basketball team. The school’s president and athletic director in one corner, laughing, thumbing through their iPhones. The Southland Conference men’s basketball tournament championship trophy on the counter.
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Wade sipped on unsweetened tea and looked around. Three days earlier, over lunch, he confided that he knew he’d get back, but didn’t think it’d be so soon. “There are only certain schools that’ll hire me,” he said then. “I’m not for everybody. I understand that.”
McNeese State was the one to do it. It took the risk; chased winning over everything, created the re-entry strategy. And this is the reward. The school is going to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2002. “Here we go!” Wade said, pointing at the TV as ESPN flashed highlights of the night’s win. Everyone erupted. “Yeahhhhhhh” bellowed Christian Shumate, one of Wade’s stars. The 6-foot-6 forward was dressed in full cowboy garb —Stetson, vest, leather chaps, jeans. He and teammate DJ Richards Jr. brought the Southland trophy to Mr. Bill’s so fans could take pictures. Also to grab some peel n’ eat boiled shrimp and hot wings.
Wade leaned in, eyebrows raised, pointed around and asked, “So what do you think of all this?”
A loaded question. Not long ago, Wade was maybe the most polarizing figure in college basketball’s supposed apocalypse — the 2017 FBI investigation that set out to unravel the sport, expose all corruption and forever change the game, only to instead whimper away into a series of low-level convictions, leaving the NCAA and its now-disbanded Independent Accountability Resolution Process to litigate its findings. LSU fired Wade on the eve of the 2022 NCAA Tournament after it received an NCAA notice of allegations detailing numerous Level I violations involving him.
Some onlookers thought he might end up with a personal “death penalty” from the NCAA. Allegations of luring recruits with impermissible payments seemed pretty rock solid when a federal wiretap — one first reported by Yahoo and later broadcast in an HBO documentary — caught Wade complaining that a “strong-ass offer” wasn’t able to land a recruit. He added: “I’ve made deals for as good of players as him that were f—ing a lot simpler than this.”
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Wade was speaking to Christian Dawkins, the FBI’s mark in an attempt to build a case exposing individuals bribing players, their families and college coaches. In the HBO documentary, “The Scheme,” Dawkins praised Wade for not cooperating with any investigation. “He basically said f— you to the NCAA and to the university he worked for,” Dawkins said.
“This is the life,” Dawkins added. “Will Wade is definitely a f—ing gangster for what he did.”
Now, two years after his dismissal at LSU, Wade is coaching only 130 miles from Baton Rouge. He was hired by McNeese exactly one year ago, despite the NCAA’s investigation still pending, and preemptively given a five-game suspension and a year of recruiting restrictions by McNeese. In June 2023, the NCAA essentially doubled the penalty — a 10-game suspension, two years of recruiting restrictions and a two-year show-cause penalty — coming up well short of proving the entirety of those Level I claims. The investigation was officially over. There was no firing squad.
The Cowboys went 8-2 during Wade’s suspension, then 22-1 after he took over. They won the Southland Conference regular-season title, going 17-1, then claimed the league’s NCAA Tournament bid with two wins in the conference tournament.
Wade will tell you he doesn’t take any pleasure in how much all of this enrages some people.“I don’t wake up and want to piss people off.” But he knows he does, so he won’t shy away from it. If anything, he’ll do the opposite. Maybe lean in a little. To this day, he’s never particularly apologized for anything at LSU, nor admitted to any wrongdoing.
“Nope,” he now says. “I am who I am.”
He leaned closer.
“Look, here’s the thing, people who don’t like me or know us, I’m not gonna change their mind,” he said, shrugging. “There was a time in my life when I cared what other people thought. That’s over. If you want to write a hit piece on me, you are free to. It will not bother me.”
Reasonable people can debate the justice or injustice of Will Wade returning to college basketball’s biggest stage. But the hard truth everyone must accept is that Will Wade is still coaching because Will Wade wins games. If you were to place a bet in Las Vegas, or, say, the Golden Nugget in Lake Charles, on which coach will win the most games in college basketball over the next 15 or 20 years, Wade would likely be the favorite, or at least among the odds-on favorites.
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Wade ranks 11th in win percentage among all active coaches with 10 years of head coaching experience. The names ahead of him? Mark Few, Bill Self, John Calipari, Rick Pitino, John Becker, Tony Bennett, Sean Miller, Thad Matta, Randy Bennett and Tom Izzo. The difference? Wade is 41. The rest of that group averages 61.2 years old. Wade is 13 years younger than the youngest name on the list (Bennett, 54).
Not only does Wade win, he knows he does, and he’ll tell you as much. Last March, at an introductory news conference at McNeese, he predicted the same program that lost 23 games in 2022-23 would win at least 23 games in Year 1 of his tenure. McNeese hadn’t had a winning season in 13 years, hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament in 23.
Twelve months later, in going from 11-23 to 30-3, the Cowboys’ 19-game improvement has matched the NCAA record for single-season turnaround in men’s college basketball history (Murray State 1979, Ohio State 1998, Texas A&M 2022).
“There are people out there who, you know, no matter what he does, he’s a criminal,” says McNeese athletic director Heath Schroyer. “But I don’t worry about that.”
This is why it was no coincidence that McNeese was Wade’s open door. He and Schroyer have known each other loosely since 2007, when Wade worked as an assistant at Harvard alongside Kenny Blakeney, whom Schroyer played high school basketball with. Later, when Wade landed his first head-coaching gig at Chattanooga, Schroyer was the head coach four hours away at UT Martin.
Schroyer is no ordinary athletic director. Not in the modern sense, at least, where career administrators now populate most top spots. He coached, making stops as an assistant at BYU, Wyoming, Fresno State, UNLV and NC State, and holding head-coaching gigs at Portland State, Wyoming, UT Martin. Schroyer took over McNeese State in 2019-20, going 34-53 in three seasons, before transitioning to AD in 2021 as the school attempted to rebuild from the pandemic and two direct hits from hurricanes.
Schroyer’s associate head coach, John Aiken, replaced him as Cowboys head coach, but only lasted two years. Schroyer began looking for a replacement last March and asked Wade to meet him in Nashville.
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As Schroyer remembers, the two sat down, chatted, then got right to it. What happened at LSU? How bad might the NCAA hit him? “I just said, ‘Tell me what happened and don’t f—-ing bulls—- me.’” Wade’s answer was good enough for Schroyer, or at least worth the risk. Schroyer told Wade that, while other schools might kick the tires, he might be the only AD crazy enough to actually offer him the job.
“I was putting my job on the line, too,” Schroyer said. “If we hired Will, and the NCAA said, ‘Sorry, he can’t coach for three years,’ well, that’d be bad. I’d be done.”
Schroyer approached university leadership and was met by cocked eyebrows. He doubled down, got approval, and got the deal done.
When it came time to build a team, Wade did it his way. His top eight players this season include one holdover from last year’s McNeese roster, Shumate, who previously transferred from Tulsa, and seven newcomers who combined to play at 13 colleges.
Shahada Wells, this year’s Southland Player of the Year, transferred in from TCU, after stops at UT Arlington and Tyler College. Javohn Garcia arrived from College of the Sequoias in California after two seasons at UMass. Antavion Collum transferred from Cal State Bakersfield, via Ole Miss, while Mike Saunders Jr., transferred from Utah, via Cincinnati, and CJ Felder showed up from Florida, via Boston College. Omar Cooper was at Clarendon College. D.J. Richards Jr. transferred from UTSA.
“Call it what it is,” Wade deadpans. “There’s a reason we’re all at McNeese.”
And yet, they’re winning, just like Wade’s teams at Chattanooga (40-25, 27-7 Southern Conference), and VCU (51-20, 28-8 Atlantic 10), and LSU (105-51, 55-33 SEC).
While many college coaches like to advance the idea that they’re tasked with solving quantum field theory, Wade only says, “It’s the horses, not the jockeys.” He repeats it over and over. Talent wins.
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Which is why Gonzaga, with its 25 straight NCAA Tournament appearances and streak of eight straight years advancing from the first weekend, is likely feeling a little queasy. The Zags are the No. 5 seed in the Midwest Regional. They are well-established. They are talented. They are refined.
And they likely want nothing to do with a group that’s recently come to call themselves the Bayou Bandits.
One day, early in the preseason, Schroyer sat in on a marketing meeting for the 2023-24 McNeese season. The strategy unfolding seemed to tiptoe around the reality. So Schroyer interjected.
“We are what we are,” he said. “We hired Will Wade. So embrace it.”
The next thing Wade knew, he was sitting upon a horse on an open road, wearing a duster, followed by a film crew. The school dubbed him “Willy The Kid” and, upon his debut after the suspension, announced he’d been freed. “You sure about this?” Wade asked Schroyer about the horse.
He was, yes.
Willy The Kid is free👀#BayouBandits | #GeauxPokes pic.twitter.com/CvCFJODzrM
— McNeese Men’s Basketball (@McNeeseMBB) December 11, 2023
Now the school is all in. At home games, Wade enters the court before tipoff to Johnny Cash’s version of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”
You may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s down in the dark will be brought to the light
Two Mondays ago, at Southern Spice, a little homestyle spot near the McNeese campus, Wade walked in and knew damn near the whole place. It was a day before his team’s opener in the Southland tournament. An old-timer popped by the table and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“We’re countin’ on ya now,” he said.
“Aw, we know,” Wade said. “You good? Y’all need any tickets or anything? Is your grandson coming?”
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Wade has the ability to be what he needs to be, when he needs to be it. He can be a schmoozer when he needs to schmooze, a charmer when he needs to charm, country when he needs to be country, and a hard-ass when he needs to be a hard-ass. He’s always had that in him, but while riding a rocket ship from a foot-in-the-door grad assistant job at Clemson in 2005 to winning an SEC title at LSU as a 36-year-old in 2019, his mix of personality and aspiration created a combustible combination.
“I probably got a little full of myself,” he said at lunch. “Actually, I definitely did. So maybe it was good; maybe it was good to get knocked all the way down. I think I needed some adversity, needed something to check me.”
Wade claims he has perspective now, a common refrain of the housebroken. But he says it sincerely. That he understands the bigger picture. But then he unflinchingly fires off 10 or 20 text messages, head tilted downward, for five minutes, without blinking. Then he looks up, gives a wink, and says, “I may not always be right, but I’m always sure.”
With Wade, you can’t always tell if you’re in on the joke, but he likes to make you think you are. He is, right or wrong, tailor-made for college basketball’s modern era of player freedom. Nearly everything he was accused of at LSU is now legal in the age of Name, Image and Likeness. So while other coaches throw hissy fits about player payments and roster tampering, Wade admits that he’s already met with his players to learn what power conference schools have approached. Those who have offers he can’t match, he’s encouraged to move on.
“Why wouldn’t I be happy for my guys if they have the opportunity to make more money?” Wade says. “That’s the whole point. It’s to come here to raise your value. The fact that an SEC school wants to contact one of my guys and pay him six figures? Why wouldn’t I be happy about that? I don’t care.”
Wade says he’ll find other players. And he’ll be honest with them, too.
“I think that’s why his players care to play for him,” said Shumate, the Cowboys’ second-leading scorer. “He’s gonna be straight with you, whether it’s what you want to hear or not.”
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After the Southland title game, Wade was last to climb the ladder at Legacy Center, the Cowboys’ home court. Say what you will about him, but there’s no denying that all his players pulled out their cell phones to record him cutting down the net, cheering every step up the ladder.
Over the loudspeaker, a song blasted to accompany the moment.
Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”
That Wade landed in Lake Charles wasn’t as much fate, as it was desperation. The place needed something to cheer for, someone who could win.
Between August 2020 and May 2021, this section of southwest Louisiana, along the coastline between New Orleans and Houston, was hit by four federally declared disasters in nine months. First came Hurricane Laura, a Category 4, the strongest hurricane to strike the area since records began in 1851. Then Hurricane Delta, six weeks later. Then a crippling winter ice storm. Then an outbreak of severe spring storms, flooding the already waterlogged city as tornadoes touched down throughout the area. All this time later, some residents of Lake Charles (population 85,000) have yet to return, and swaths of the city are still rebuilding. It took Mr. Bill’s two and a half years to reopen.
There’s no flimsy juxtaposition between Lake Charles’ resiliency and Wade being a cat who’s lost count of his lives, but there’s no question what he’s given the town. Legacy Center, opened in 2018, only to be covered in tarps two years later, filled most of its 4,200 seats nightly this season.
At Mr. Bill’s, a local came over to thank him and added, “You probably could be somewhere else.”
Yes, and no. At this time last year, most would balk at the idea of hiring Will Wade. Now? His name is back on the board and he acknowledges, yes, “I want to get back to the high level.” Wade says he’ll always weigh what McNeese has done for him versus the opportunities that will come.
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“It is heavily tilted toward the place that gave me the second chance,” he says. “I love McNeese State, I’m indebted to this place, to my AD and to my president. That’s why I signed the new contract.”
Wade and Schroyer in February agreed on a five-year extension worth $700,000 per year. More notably, the deal’s buyout was increased to $1.25 million if Wade is hired away after this season, and $1 million after next season. McNeese will make its money back, plus some change, and have a program that’s better off than it ever was. Wade, for his part, says he has “every intention of coming back here for at least another year.” Remember, there’s still one year remaining on his NCAA show-cause order. “That’ll scare some schools away.”
As Schroyer sees it, Wade can remain in Lake Charles until he gets “back to the SEC or the ACC or a place where he can win a national championship.” Then, Schroyer predicts, Wade will return to Louisiana years later, run for governor, and win.
These are things most places don’t say out loud.
But Will Wade and McNeese State are not most places.
They’ll be outlaws at the NCAA Tournament, and wouldn’t want it any other way. When asked about Wednesday’s scheduled news conference, where he’ll be the center of attention — and surrounded by NCAA logos — Wade, who was fired before his last NCAA Tournament appearance and suspended for a 2019 trip, smirked and rubbed his hand smooth across the counter.
“I dunno, how do you think I’m gonna play it?”
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photo: Johnathan Bachman / Getty Images)
