Selection Sunday is nigh in college basketball, as the fields of 68 teams for the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments are revealed.
On the women’s side at LSU there will be anticipation, celebration and a bit of anxiety. Fans will be eager to find out which teams will be sent to first- and second-round games at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center this week, and how difficult of a path Kim Mulkey’s Tigers will have to chart to the Women’s Final Four in Dallas.
On the LSU men’s side there will be silence. The long, bleak offseason is here much sooner than anyone wanted, though in reality probably not as soon as expected. Despite being the No. 14 and last seed in the Southeastern Conference tournament, the Tigers managed to take a game off of Georgia in the first round before being eliminated by Vanderbilt the next day.
At 14-19 overall, it wasn’t the worst basketball season LSU ever has had. But at 2-16 in the SEC, it was close. It matched the second-fewest wins ever by an LSU team in an 18-game SEC schedule, eclipsed only by the 1966-67 team that went 3-23 and 1-17 the year before Pete Maravich was eligible to play for the varsity.
The losses resulted in all of the predictable trouble for first-year coach Matt McMahon from a segment of LSU fans still carrying a torch for former coach (and apparently soon to be new McNeese State coach) Will Wade. They didn’t want LSU to cave to NCAA pressure in the face of accusations of recruiting violations during his tenure, the most damning being Wade’s “strong ass” offer caught on an FBI wiretap.
Wade is not coming back. And LSU had to part ways with him or risk NCAA enforcement coming down like a 16-ton weight on the athletic program, possibly affecting football. Whether you consider it fair or not — and the fact the NCAA infractions case against LSU now has dragged on for more than four years is grossly unfair — it is the reality facing the men’s basketball program.
McMahon is not going anywhere anytime soon. Somehow, athletic director Scott Woodward got him to take on this monumental challenge, and he doesn’t seem like one to quit when faced by adversity. He has six years left on his contract — seven if LSU goes on probation. It’s hard not to envision him being here for the foreseeable future.
As an SEC Network announcer said during one of LSU’s conference tournament games, no first-year SEC coach got dealt a tougher hand than McMahon did. The fact that at one point in April he had zero players on his roster is no joke. That he and his staff cobbled together a first-year roster that produced a second-team All-SEC selection in center KJ Williams and managed to win 14 games might one day actually be viewed as an achievement.
But as McMahon admitted before leaving for the tournament in Nashville, Tennessee, there is work to do. The first year of his tenure always was going to be pretty much a free pass, but LSU made little to no obvious progress toward improving the program from a competitiveness standpoint. That the Tigers actually appeared to regress offensively, defensively and handling the ball was glaring.
“We have to have a long conversation after the season about where changes need to be made,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to squeak out some wins. We weren’t able to establish ourselves in January and February.”
I don’t know whether McMahon is the man to make LSU an upper-echelon LSU contender any more than anyone else does. I do know if LSU didn’t hire him from Murray State last year that another Power Five school likely would have done so. The ringing endorsement of ESPN analyst Seth Greenberg at SEC basketball media days — “He’s just a really good basketball coach.” — still plays frequently in my mind.
But it’s been a hard slog. Really hard. McMahon allows little insight into his mental process and feelings, but there was a glimmer recently.
“It’s been very challenging,” he said. “I wish I’d done a better job for our players, given them a better chance to win games this year. We’ve got to find a way to better handle adversity, navigating those challenging times at a higher level.”
The challenging times, they aren’t going away for LSU. More major roster churn is expected. McMahon may decide he has to also make changes to his staff.
Time and patience are required. The latter is always in short supply, but especially now considering the achievements of the other big coaching hires Woodward has made — football’s Brian Kelly, baseball’s Jay Johnson and women’s basketball’s Mulkey.
The long and short of it is, the first year under McMahon was a write-off. Virtually a total loss. He gets one under the circumstances.
Now that Year Two actually has begun, improvement must begin, too.
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