re: I still love Will Wade

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Wade fans will forever embellish how bad the program was when he took over, then conveniently ignore that McMahon inherited an empty roster and a very dark cloud of sanctions.

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The Jones era peaked in 14-15 with the NCAA Tournament appearance. The next season preseason expectations where the the highest they had been in years with a highly ranked recruiting class coming in headlined by Ben Simmons. LSU was a preseason top 25 team for the first time in nearly 10 years. Almost from the jump that team looked like they weren't going to live up to expectations as they lost 4 of their first 8 games. 3 of which to VERY mediocre teams. Once SEC play started LSU started to improve. The season then reached a crescendo when #1 Oklahoma entered a completely full PMAC. LSU lost a heartbreaker that day which signified the beginning of the end of the waste of time that was the Jones era. By the end of the season the team, and their best player (Simmons) had flat out quit. Culminating in a 33 point loss to Texas A&M in the SEC Tournament where LSU scored at TOTAL of 38 points.

The next season apathy completely set in. Everyone knew Jones was on his way out after wasting the prior season (IIRC, LSU was the only preseason top 25 team to not make the NCAAT). At very best, only about 5,000 asses were in seats at the PMAC to watch LSU flop to its worst SEC performance in program history. Any and all goodwill the program had built up between 2013-2016 was COMPLETELY gone. Wade walked into a program where the feeling surrounding it was worse than anger. It was apathy. No one gave a shite. From his very first press conference he instilled a sense of hope and belief in the program. He then went out and signed Tremont Waters who was the key in taking a team picked to finish dead last in the SEC to one that was at least competitive.

McMahon walked into a tough situation. However, the sense surrounding the program was the complete opposite from when Wade took over. Anger surrounded the program. Not apathy. I will ALWAYS argue apathy is worse because anger at least means someone still cares enough to get angry. And Wade had shown that with solid players you COULD consistently win at LSU...something no other HC had done in nearly 30 years.

Now, to be fair, Wade did not have to deal with an ENTIRE roster deciding (initially) they weren't returning to the team. That was unprecedented (at least at LSU). But McMahon also had two big advantages available to him that Wade didn't in 2017 to help quickly rebuild the roster. The one-free-transfer rule AND NIL, which essentially sanctioned "pay for play". McMahon took full advantage to both retain some players from last year's team and bring in key transfers (along with highly rated freshmen).

Who entered a "worse" situation is completely subjective. Wade had a roster when he arrived. But it was one that produced terrible results the year before and he had very few tools at his disposal to quickly rebuild the program. McMahon had no roster. But he also had tools available to quickly rebuild it.

I was a Wade fan. I was angry to see him go because I know the last 4-5 years of consistent success was the outlier relative to the last 30 years of LSU basketball. However, I'm not so self-absorbed as to completely dismiss the success of the prior coach (Wade), or hope for the failure of the new coach (McMahon) just to win some sort message board credit points. I hope McMahon exceeds any and all success Wade had at LSU. But that hope doesn't cause me to ignore the fact Wade was the best thing to happen to LSU basketball in 30 years. Even if LSU does face the "dark cloud of sanctions" (and I don't think they will. Those will be reserved for Wade individually) so what? LSU returns to being the mediocre to bad program for a few years... just like they were for most of the 30 years prior to Wade? As a fan I'd rather have enjoyed consistent success and lose it rather than rarely seen it all