Will Wade promises history 'one way or another' at LSU: Will firing or national championship come first?

LSU's commitment to football success could prove challenging to Wade's goal of bringing a basketball national title to Baton Rouge

Will Wade said all the right things during Monday's re-introduction, of sorts, at LSU, kicking off his second stint as Tigers basketball coach after his first left the program with a black eye. Resources, commitment and institutional alignment are the necessary boxes Wade felt needed to be checked to establish a perennial winner and NCAA Tournament-bound team, but how many of those are actually feasible at a school whose primary objective is to continue feeding the football monster?

There's a better chance at this hire going up in smoke for the Tigers than for Wade to find himself on a ladder cutting down nets at the end of March Madness a few years from now.

Getting back with your ex occasionally results in a satisfying relationship after both parties realize what they've missed. However, rekindling an old flame can often get messy, especially if there are no boundaries set for its extent. In Wade's case, it sounds like he understands what he's getting himself into and is convinced the Tigers are putting maximum effort into building a basketball powerhouse -- an admirable goal LSU has never accomplished.

He even has time for termination jokes.

"Make no mistake, this is home. I wasn't born in Louisiana, but Louisiana's home for me and my family. ... we're coming back to make history, we're going to make history one way or the other," Wade said from inside Pete Maravich Assembly Center. "We're coming back to try to hang a banner and win a national championship, or I'm going to be the first coach fired from the same school twice. One way or another, we're going to make history."

LSU can pretend to care about basketball all it wants, but the Tigers will always hold a football-first mindset within its athletic department. Since John Brady led the men's basketball program from 1997 to 2008, the average tenure for head coaches has been five seasons with mixed results. Wade held the highest winning percentage of any of them at .673 and would've kept his job had he not broken NCAA rules.

Moreover, even LSU baseball takes attention away from hoops with a roster annually funded above the cap. Jay Johnson, the highest-paid coach in the country, has a contract through the 2032 season, and the likelihood of any of those roster-building resources being allocated to basketball is slim. He's only three years removed from LSU's last national title on the diamond, by the way.

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Wade was brought in to earn NCAA Tournament bids for the Tigers. There's backlash from his abrupt exit from NC State, but there's considerably more outside pressure to win quickly than internally, per sources in Baton Rouge. He'll be expected to produce, but Wade's success or failure will not be determined by Final Four trips. Respectability comes first, and if he doesn't get expansive resources to assemble a team of elite players, that's not going to happen.

Since reaching the school's fourth and most recent Final Four appearance in 2006, the Tigers have produced four NCAA Tournament wins. Wade has three of them, the last coming in 2021 -- one year prior to being fired for cause for recruiting violations caught on a wiretap.

"I look at it like this: I think we've got a fresh start now," Wade said. "I think we've got everything in place to win that maybe wouldn't have been in place had I stayed. I'm excited to be back and finish what we started. I do feel like there's some unfinished business here."

There's a renewed energy for the Tigers that the program hasn't had since Wade's last stint at LSU, but the dynamics of college sports have changed considerably since then. He'll have a shot at recruiting in a different talent pool than what previous coach Matt McMahon had to work with the Tigers if investment promises come to fruition. 

LSU's previous coaching regime essentially inherited a shattered vase that McMahon was asked to put back together with very little assets compared to other SEC programs. And then, the rug was pulled out from under him in favor of a coach who previously placed the program in a bad light.

LSU's basketball future under Wade

How much will it take to fund a championship roster, and can Wade get the most out of the talent he signs to turn it around in Baton Rouge? Like others across the power conference ranks, LSU has $20.5 million -- with that number expected to expand annually in a rapidly changing landscape -- in revenue sharing to distribute back to its athletes with men's basketball getting around 15% (or $2.7 million) of that.

Wade is going to want a bigger piece of LSU's pie in revenue sharing for his program. LSU football just signed the top-ranked transfer portal class in the country, much of that revenue share percentage earmarked for talent retention and many of those newcomers on the free agency market. The Tigers also just spent in excess of $100 million for a coaching change after firing Brian Kelly to land Lane Kiffin and his staff.

Verge Ausberry, LSU's vice president and director of athletics, will have a say in the roster-building question on the hardwood -- how important is men's basketball to LSU's bottom line, and does Wade have enough resources to accomplish goals the university expects of him as the Tigers' new hire?

Landing McNeese's Heath Schroyer as deputy AD, who will have oversight over external relations and men's basketball, should be a shot in the arm for Wade given the pair's history. He'll at least have Ausberry's ear when it comes to delegating funds to hoops.

Wade is a successful coach. He has made the NCAA Tournament in eight of his previous nine seasons as the program leader at VCU, LSU, McNeese and NC State. However, there are at least 11 SEC basketball programs with a higher operating budget than LSU (based on the 2025 fiscal year) and many of those teams were tournament-bound.

There has to be substantial buy-in for Wade's second run at LSU to offer a noticeable ROI, and that starts with players. If men's basketball does not quickly ascend to second-most important behind football at the administrative level with a hefty boost in roster spending, Wade's going to find the new SEC and its competition level very much different than how it looked in 2022.