Will Wade hoping for a long goodbye

McNeese State's coach supervises an upset of Clemson on his way to a promotion.

Let’s not read too much into this, but it was hard to watch McNeese State and Clemson on Thursday and not conclude that the players were speaking with their feet.

McNeese State’s feet were kicking up dust like the Road Runner. They were all over the court in Providence, seizing loose balls, beating Clemson downcourt, igniting and lifting off to get rebounds and block shots. The Cowboy players, having mastered the art of Twitter, knew that coach Will Wade was on the market, to the point that he’d surely be flying to North Carolina State for a press conference the moment McNeese was out of the tournament. Were they celebrating the prospect of a new coach?.

Clemson’s feet, meanwhile, were in dire need of bunion surgery. They seemed to be encased in Tony Soprano-generated cement. The Clemson coach, Brad Brownell, had taken the Tigers to a school-record in wins for a season, but here they shot 20.8 percent in the first half and trailed 31-13 at the break. Ian Schieffelin is the mop-headed, 6-foot-8, 240 pound power forward who grabbed 9.4 rebounds per game to rank third in the ACC and became one of the league’s most identifiable players. He’s not the first guy you’d choose on the playground, and in this game he played like it. “They got a lot of offensive rebounds and that hurt, because I’m supposed to keep that from happening,” he said. But Schieffelin had plenty of company.

Anyway, Brownell is in the midst of contract re-negotiations with Clemson after he signed a five-year, $20 million deal at the end of last season. Was that the source of the Tigers’ funk?

Probably not. McNeese stretched the lead to 24 points, but Clemson did scramble at the end and make McNeese work for what became a 67-65 win. The Cowboys missed nine foul shots in the second half and allowed Clemson to hit eight 3-pointers.

Still, it was the one true upset of the first full day of the tournament, a 12th seed over a 5. Drake, a 11 seed, did handle Missouri, 67-57, but that didn’t surprise anybody familiar with the 31-win Bulldogs, or with coach Ben McCollum, who said he “expected” this.

More people expected McNeese to do this in 2024, when it went 30-4. It went head-first into reality, also known as Gonzaga, in an 86-65 loss. Wade said the Cowboys looked upon that one as a “field trip,” but this trip was strictly briefcases and buttoned-down collars. McNeese sprung a zone defense on the Tigers, which wasn’t in its game tapes, but then switched it to a man-to-man as the possession went on. “We didn’t handle it very well,” Brownell said.

Nobody ever said Wade couldn’t win. He did so at Virginia Commonwealth and LSU, which went to two tournaments in Wade’s three seasons. But that was in the quaint era of the “amateur athlete,” who was supposed to subsist on canned tuna all winter for the love of the game. Wade believed that success went to the high bidder, and an FBI wiretap got Wade saying he’d given a “strong-ass offer” to a recruit. One allegation led to another, and LSU fired Wade in 2022. He was persona non grata until McNeese called, and he still had to sit out the first 10 games of last season. Turns out, he was ahead of his time.

The Cowboys have won 57 games in these two seasons, with Christian Shumate as their rock. He was on hand at Gonzaga last year and Clemson this year. He also heard Wade confirm, to the team, that he was on the move. Dodging those rumors would be like trying to sneak across the Autobahn.

It’s always been painful to hear a coach squirm his way out of such situations, especially in the postseason. Nick Saban was the Dolphins’ coach when the Alabama job opened up. He spent months denying every fiber of the story, and then the season ended and he was wearing a crimson jacket. When Steve Sarkisian was having trouble controlling his addictions as USC coach, athletic director Pat Haden steadfastly denied he was making a change, until he did.

“I was supporting my coach,” Haden said later. “And I did support him until he wasn’t the coach anymore.”

Wade sliced through all that, which is the sign of these unfettered times. Everybody’s making money and everybody knows how much, and everybody knows that making more money is the name of the larger game.

“We can sit here and lie about it but it is what it is,” Wade said. “Our guys ain’t worried about it, I’m not worried about it, the administration’s not worried about it. We’ve been honest with everybody.

“Half the kids I recruited, I told, ‘Hey, the goal is to go Power Five at the end of this year. Some of you guys can go with me.’ We all know what’s up. For our guys, this is great. They’re going to have a lot of schools in their DMs tonight, looking to pick them up. I mean, come on. There are five coaches right now negotiating with other schools. Villanova is trying to hire a coach out of the tournament right now.”

The players? They might be studying all kinds of things in class, but when it comes to this world, they’re all business majors.

“When you’re in a loop and both sides are transparent about things, there’s not too much room for conflict,” Shumate said. “Everybody is aware of everything that’s going on.

In other news, Darian DeVries left West Virginia to become Indiana’s head coach. That requires a $6 million buyout from Indiana to West Virginia, but it also removes a coach that was in Morgantown for only one year. This came on the heels of West Virginia’s exclusion from the NCAA field which, as outrages go, was pretty weak. After all, the Mountaineers lost a first-round Big 12 tournament game to Colorado, who had lost its first 16 league games. Now the school will be pursuing its fourth coach in four years, right in the middle of college free agency.

This also has brought into question the status of Tucker DeVries, Darian’s talented son. Tucker averaged 14 points in his eight games as a Mountaineer. Then he left with an upper-body injury — what is this, the NHL? — and later was ruled out for the season. Now he’s in the transfer portal, with a one-way vehicle waiting on the other side, with its Waze tuned into Bloomington. You can get a medical redshirt year from the NCAA if you failed to play in 30 percent of your team’s games, and DeVries played in 25 percent of West Virginia’s.

Were Indiana and DeVries in cahoots all along? There’s no evidence of that, but the distress level in Almost Heaven is prompting such questions. And certainly coaches have the right to leave a program after one season if a player has the same option. It doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, or a testament to that coach’s loyalty, and regard for those around him.

And, in still other news, Texas is in the process of firing coach Rodney Terry, who, just last week, supervised wins over Vanderbilt and Texas A&M to get the Longhorns into the NCAAs. Texas played Xavier in the First Four game Wednesday and lost, 86-80. Had Zach Freemantle’s 3-pointer hit the rim and fallen into the hands of Texas rebounder, it might not have. Instead it missed so poorly that it fell into the hands of Dailyn Swain, who put it back for a 5-point Xavier win. The new Texas coach will be the fourth since the administration ,in 2014, decided it could do better than Rick Barnes, who has made Tennessee a top 10 program.

It’s always been known as the Silly Season but it never lasted 12 months before.

Wade needed McNeese State and vice versa, but it was never going to be death-do-us-part. What’s next? “Keep going, keep winning,” Wade said. As they say, you don’t have to remember a script if you’re already telling the truth.

Otherwise:

– Michigan had a lot of doubters going into its first-round game with UC San Diego. A 10-0 burst out of the gate did not rattle the Tritons, who kept surging back and had a shot to win at the end. Tyler McGhie, who is UCSD’s best scorer and got 25 points despite 9-for-27 shooting, had a chance to tie it, but was contested by 7-foot Danny Wolf and missed. The Tritons made their comeback even though Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, the Big West Player of the Year, fouled out after 25 minutes with only seven points. Michigan won, 68-65, and plays Texas A&M next.

– For the first time in 19 years Kansas got bounced in the first round (Bradley, 2006). But the 79-72 loss to Arkansas wasn’t an upset. The Jayhawks had been a cautionary tale all season for those who think you can slap together a raft of transfers and automatically win. They finished the season 21-13, although they made a nice comeback and, realistically, might have won if they hadn’t lost stalwart K.J. Adams to an Achilles injury late in the second half. Big men Jonas Aidoo and Trevon Brazile won it for the Razorbacks by combining for 33 points, five blocks and 17 rebounds; Hunter Dickerson, the Michigan transfer who mans the middle for Kansas, was 4 for 13.

— Nobody looked sharper than Creighton, which jumped on Louisville early and won, 89-75. The Blue Jays shot 57.1 percent and forced 19 Louisville turnovers, and starting guards Steven Ashworth and Jamiya Neal combined for 51 points and 17 rebounds, 12 by Neal. The defenseless Cardinals did nothing to prop up the ACC’s crumbling profile. With Louisville and Clemson out, Duke and North Carolina are the only survivors.

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