BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Will Wade doesn’t ignore the firestorm that has followed him for almost a decade since the previous time he was LSU’s men’s basketball coach.
“We’re coming back to try to hang a banner, win a national championship, or I’m going to be the first coach fired from the same school twice,” Wade said at his introductory news conference Monday as he officially became the first SEC men’s head basketball coach in history to be fired and re-hired by the same school. “One way or another, we’re going to make history.”
In his first LSU stint from 2017-22, Wade was 105-51 with an SEC regular-season championship and three NCAA tournament appearances. LSU fired him in March 2022 for his involvement in NCAA Level I and Level II recruiting violations.
After sitting out a season, followed by two years as head coach for McNeese State and N.C. State this past season, he’s back at LSU. The Tigers fired Matt McMahon, Wade’s predecessor, after he went 60-70 overall and 17-55 in the SEC in four seasons.
Immediately, former McNeese president and now-LSU president Wade Rousse began pursuing Wade. He won two Southland Conference championships and went 1-2 in the NCAA tournament with the Lake Charles, La.-based school.
“At LSU, we do not gather to celebrate mediocrity,” Rousse said. “We do not aim to simply be competitive. We aim to be elite. We want to win national championships. That is the standard. That is the expectation. That is why we are here today.”
In luring Wade from N.C. State, where he was 20-14 (including an NCAA tournament First Four loss to Texas), LSU signed him to a seven-year, $30 million deal, a commitment of a roster budget exceeding $12 million, and paid his $4 million buyout.
Wade’s abrupt departure from N.C. State was a stunner. He expressed optimism less than three weeks ago about the future of the Wolfpack program.
“I’m excited to be at N.C. State,” Wade said on March 12 after his team was eliminated from the ACC tournament. “I was hired at N.C. State to do a job. We’re going to win and we’re going to win big at N.C. State.”
Nine days later, LSU announced it had re-hired Wade, shocking N.C. State athletic director Boo Corrigan.
“I believed he was telling me his true intentions,” Corrigan said. “There was no reason for me in my job not to believe the words that I was hearing coming back to me from Coach Wade.”
Wade, heavily criticized by national media, said he’s at peace about his N.C. State departure.
“I long ago quit worrying about my perception," Wade said. “N.C State was great to me. I think some of the things have been mischaracterized on how I left. They’re pretty mad for a coach they didn’t think was very good. That’s the way it goes.”
Wade is 266-119 with eight NCAA tournament appearances in 12 seasons as a head coach at five different schools. But he views LSU as different than the rest.
“I’ve never connected with a fan base and with people like I have with LSU and Louisiana,” he said. “I feel like we left the book open a little bit. We left some chapters out there, and we left some chapters unfinished.”
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