Will Wade Firing = Poor Business Decision

Fat Scott went from what we thought could be best AD in country to a laundry list of absolute failures and lack of due diligence one would expect of our AD.

His crowning achievements are over paying for a WBB coach so would win a title in WBB and having to be told no twice to get to Jay to lead the premiere baseball program.

Wade was the scapegoat, so football didn't receive any meaningful infractions.

People keep denying this but it be true

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It’s been years

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That's kind of been the issue. It has been four LONG years of really bad basketball. LSU fired Wade to avoid significant sanctions, then effectively self imposed the death penalty on the program by totally missing on the next HC hire. LSU has, cumulatively, been the worst program in the SEC and one of the worst among all major conferences over the past 4 years.

While I've ALWAYS said I understand why LSU chose to fire Wade, these last four years have lent credence to an argument that LSU would have been better off retaining Wade and navigating any increased sanctions (relative to what LSU ultimately received). I mean you can't get any worse than worst in the SEC (LSU has the fewest SEC wins of any program, excluding Texas and OU, over the last four seasons)

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If there was more to the situation than what is publicly known, such as LSU sacrificing basketball to save football, there should have at least been a cryptic press release to make this known. At least then I would have some confidence that LSU made a wise business decision. But that never happened.

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In short, Wade was not very cooperative with LSU in the investigation. You could argue that is not unreasonable given Wade and LSU could have adverse interests in the investigation (i.e. LSU had to put its self-interests ahead of Wade', and vice-versa). But that is what happened. Then, when the NOA was issued, it contained factual allegations that Wade had previously told LSU (i.e. Tate and Woodward) were not true. Tate and Woodward felt Wade had directly lied to them, on multiple occasions (which is probably to some degree accurate), and simply did not trust him. That's why he was fired (even though I will always say the timing was a slap in the face to the players who had nothing to do with the allegations). It's also why Tate and Woodward refused to consider rehiring him after last season when there was a behind the scenes push to make that happen.

That's why I've always said I understood why LSU chose to fire him. I just thought then that the alternative (making a coaching change) would likely be worse than the (then) current situation (retaining Wade and navigating the investigation) given the 30ish year history of LSU basketball prior to Wade. Unfortunately, four years later that has proven to be 100% accurate.

Exactly my point. Acknowledge what happened before making the next hire, whomever that will be. This is not about WW vs. any other coach, but about risk management, the law of unintended consequences, and instilling stakeholder confidence that the next hire demonstrates a long term commitment to LSU basketball. The WW decision and subsequent fall out suggests the opposite.

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LSU should have reprimanded the General

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they did

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taken its lumps including the negative press

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they did

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maybe even suspended him

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they did

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and viewed retaining him as a long term business decision

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they did

Firing him before the tournament and screwing over a guy like Darius Days…i hope Woodward’s fat lard jabba the hut arse has nightmares of getting his shite pushed in by the ncaa boogety man forever

Some of yall need Elsa in your life.

Let it go.

The poor business decision was giving MM such a large contract

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You morons keep forgetting Wade was fired to protect the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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That's long been a popular narrative, but I don't really know how true it actually is. The NCAA has been proven less, and less, meaningful with each passing year. So much so that the SEC commissioner recently acknowledged there are SEC schools who want to abandon it altogether. The investigation of LSU (including football) was conducted through the IARP process. LSU wasn't the only school investigating by the IARP. What ultimately resulted was none of the schools investigated by the IARP received significant sanctions...including LSU. The NCAA hated the IARP process so much that the NCAA disbanded it after its initial "trial run". Thus, with hindsight always being 20/20, it's very likely that even if LSU chose to keep Wade in 2022 the ultimate penalties assessed to LSU basketball AND football would have been, relatively speaking, negligible. Particularly with the corresponding rise of NIL and freedom of transfer.

Basically, LSU acted in accordance with trying to appease the 1990's NCAA...while the college sports world was totally changing around them. Kind of like a citizen of East Berlin making certain to adhere to every East German protocol worried about East German punishment....while the Berlin Wall was being torn down.