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Redirecting LSU's focus to young American athletes may make the respective teams less competitive, but who cares?

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I’m sure the coaches whose jobs depend solely on winning and losing care. They aren’t importing talent to spite Americans. They are simply trying to bring in the best players they can get in order to have the best success possible. If that happens to be players from other countries, so be it. For you, as a fan, it’s just entertainment. For he or she as a coach it’s their profession.

The coaches who wins with foreign players gets promotions and increasingly lucrative contracts. The coach who loses with domestic players gets fired.

Sports are one of the best meritocracies in the world. If the US players are getting beaten out here is some advice …get better! All the coach really wants is the best player regardless of race, nationality, or socioeconomic status.

Closets? Golf course parking lots? The next allegation to come out will be that she once got busy in a Burger King bathroom

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I might need to start a new thread and someone explain this to me. Alex Box stadium is sold out each season…

30+ games, 12k attendance at least, avg ticket price is $15 - That’s at least $180,000 per home game.

$5.4 million in just ticket sales each season. Sponsorships, suites, boosters, etc… are extra.

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That's just your estimated revenue

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How the hell are we poor? Lol

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It's expensive to operate LSU baseball

In 23-24 LSU baseball generated $6,476,138 in revenue. That's good!

Unfortunately, it had expenses totaling $8,444,469...which means it operated at a nearly $2M deficit

LINK

LSU baseball is not "poor", at all, relative to the college baseball market place. But its not so lucrative to pay a bunch of "salaries" at or above minor-league value either.

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This team will go as far as the PG takes them Still need a legit SEC PG.

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In the past Wade has been able to find ways to put good offenses on the floor even without "traditional" PGs. Smart was more of a combo guard. As was Copeland last year at NC State. Yes, a PG like Waters would be tremendous, but Wade has overcome that.

Defense is my concern (as it often the case with Wade's teams)

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Long days, short years.

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Truest statement anyone has ever said about having children. The days can be long. But the years go by in a flash

Don't ever turn down an opportunity to take a photo/video

From a very high level perspective, this roster looks to have good frontcourt size and a chance to be really skilled and stretch the floor offensively. For the majority of his career Wade has been very good at putting really good offensive teams on the floor. This roster has a chance to be no different. The biggest concern is at PG. For as skilled as several of these guys are, they may not be good shot creators, which hurts things if you don't have a solid PG getting others in position to fully excel.

IMO, the bigger concern is defense and rebounding. International players are often more offensively skilled their US counterparts, but they don't play as physical a game on defense and on the boards. Niang and Dioubate are more defender/rebounders than the other guys, but we'll have to see if that is enough (pending more roster additions). Particularly, given the majority of Wade's teams have not been good defensively.

I think this roster is going to score, a lot. The concern is the same as many Wade teams. Will it be too imbalanced (good offensively, not good defensively) to allow LSU to really compete with the elite teams? Good? Yes. Elite? TBD

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He wont be cleared by the NCAA, but if we have support from the local Judiciaries that wont matter. Injunctions, delayed hearings, appeals etc. We could conceivably lose the case next April and still get a full year out of these guys.

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His situation is more in line with Charles Beadiko. Best case scenario is a local judge would grant a TRO. However, the T stands for "temporary". I suspect the permanent ruling would fall more in line with the Beadiko ruling.

If you want to make the argument, go ahead. However, if I were advising Wade I would tell him not to count on Luis being a part of the roster and to plan accordingly...which I'm sure Wade is.

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He nailed the hypocrisy and double standard square on the head.

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Completely.

There ALREADY "pros", including international pros playing college basketball. Illinois just went to the Final Four with several. Hell, McMahon's top commit before he was fired was one. Also, as Matt points out, programs like UNC and Kentucky were trying to sign the players LSU ultimately signed. If they go to Kentucky or UNC we hear nothing but how great a job their coaches did. Particularly UNC's first year HC. But Wade does it and it's "horrible for college basketball." I guess the double-standard is you are allowed to have a few international pros on your team...but not most of your starting 5. Somehow the former is ok, but the latter isn't.

No one listens to Wade when he does interviews...because that would throw a water on the hypocritical fire. But he has already acknowledged this will likely be a one season approach ahead of anticipated NCAA rule changes. But Wade doesn't owe the NCAA, or particularly the sports media, anything. If they had their druthers, they would have permanently ended his career as a D-1 basketball coach. Not because they had any prior personal vendetta against Wade. But because they could "celebrate" ending his career as a skin on the wall. That, despite the fact their feigned outrage was totally hypocritical knowing full well Wade wasn't doing anything all of the other big time HCs of power programs were doing. Hell, you had Dickie V constantly celebrating John Calipari..a guy who had TWO Final Four appearances vacated at TWO different schools for NCAA rules violations...and I like Calipari!

I don't think Wade ever wanted to be a "villain". But at this point I think he has just embraced it. Largely because he's not in the business of making his competition happy by living up to some arbitrary moral standard that they don't hold themselves to.

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Who else

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Johnny Jones

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He has no clue about basketball has proved that over many years. Not only that throughout the entire McMahon tenure up until the day before the switch to Wade, McMahon personally and on orders wanted to keep McMahon over Wade. I’m not saying I know for sure but there’s enough evidence that Moscona does not understand at all or want Wade as a coach/ambassador for LSU. Moscona doesn’t dislike Wade the person or wish him bad success because that would mean the hand that feeds would do worse. But at every turn will downplay credit to any Wade success and try and build up McMahon or any other program. It’s just odd, I assume it goes back to when Jordy Cullotta left Guranty and took the amount of acces they had with him to his own thing, maybe has to do with that.

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There was a power struggle behind the scenes to get Wade back to LSU. Not everyone was fully on board. Including Verge and some prominent boosters. Matt has good relationships with Verge and some of the boosters. He doesn't have strong relationships with the people who were the driving forces to get Wade back. That was largely Jeff Landry and his political supporters' allies/supporters. So some of what you were hearing from Matt was just one side of the behind the scenes battle...the side that was not all in on Wade returning. They didn't want to allow themselves to be bullied by the Governor, for various reasons. Money being the primary reason given the expense of firing Kelly and hiring Kiffin.

Matt doesn't dislike Wade, and I don't think they have a bad relationship. It's just that he was only discussing the information he was privy to. In this instance, the sources providing that information did not want Wade back to LSU.

On this particular topic I'm ok with Matt's position (even if I somewhat disagree). I think on the whole ALL college sports fans would just like a world where there was clarity on the rules and there weren't constant runs to the courthouse to bend them in your favor for your specific need at the time. But if that is how the sausage is made then you either try to use it for a competitive advantage or get left behind

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Its not even about that, its a real head scratcher why so much hate?

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Because he was dubbed by the hypocritical media and other coaches as the "face" of cheating...when they knew full well it has been going on for decades (the media) and they do the same thing (the coaches). It's like Rafael Palmero bashing Jose Canseco for saying Palmero used steroids...when he new damn good and well that he DID use steroids.

They don't like him because he didn't "suffer enough" as a skin on the wall for the media. When the story first broke in 2019, the media was going to "change college basketball forever". Less than two years later their crusade was rendered meaningless when the transfer rules and NIL became "legal". Because of that Wade wasn't banished to Elba forever like they hoped. He quickly popped up in Lake Charles and began having success once more.

They hate him because he broke an unwritten, ever shifting, moral code by returning to the school that fired him.

They hate him because he's not behaving in a way the media thinks he's supposed to behave.

But in the end all that matter is what LSU fans think. Which leads to the question for LSU fans: Do you want to be liked by people who really don't care about you? Or do you want to see your team win? By all accounts McMahon was liked by the media. However, I don't recall glowing articles about how he was such a great guy while he was leading the worst program in the SEC. That's because the media didn't really care about a guy who lost, constantly.