LSU basketball reinstatement
Wolken: AD needs to further explain reasoning
On a not-so-quiet Sunday night, somewhere in between the euphoria of Tiger Woods winning the Masters and the social media buzz over the final-season premiere of “Game of Thrones,” LSU announced it had ended its 38-day suspension of basketball coach Will Wade.
The announcement’s timing was fortuitous. By morning, any conversation about LSU reinstating a coach whose own words on an FBI wiretap suggested he was willing to buy a recruit had all but disappeared from the national consciousness.
But LSU’s twin statements Sunday night — one from athletics director Joe Alleva, the other from Wade — raise more questions than they answer. And given both the gravity of the initial allegations and the school’s dramatic action to suspend Wade right before his team was about to play in the NCAA Tournament, LSU’s lack of transparency about why it changed course simply isn’t good enough.
USA TODAY submitted a request through an LSU spokesman early Monday morning to either follow up with Alleva directly or clarify several of the points that his announcement left vague. That request had not been answered by Monday night.
So what we’re left with are two statements that seem very different in tone: one from Wade, which reads as if everything is back to normal, and one from an athletics director who listened to Wade’s denials of wrongdoing but is yet to publicly commit to believing them.
“Coach Wade’s explanations and clarifications offered during the meeting, absent actual evidence of misconduct, satisfy his contractual obligation to LSU,” Alleva wrote. “Accordingly, I have recommended that Coach Wade’s suspension be lifted and that he should be allowed to resume his coaching responsibilities.”
That’s a sentence straight out of an athletics director’s risk management textbook, but one that isn’t even close to satisfactory given what we know about why Wade was suspended.
Many LSU fans, of course, took this to mean that Wade is in the clear. Given both the carefully considered words LSU put together and the fact that according to multiple outlets Wade has been subpoenaed in the federal trial beginning next week for one of the key characters in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption, that seems naively optimistic.
Given all that, it’s important to pay attention to what LSU didn’t say.
It didn’t offer any specifics of how Wade explained his comment on a wiretapped phone call in 2017 — according to Yahoo and then ESPN — where he vented to Christian Dawkins, a deal-maker who worked for a sports agent and who is on trial next week, about making a “strong-ass offer” to secure the commitment of guard Javonte Smart.
It didn’t define “actual evidence of misconduct,” which matters here because it’s unclear what evidence LSU is looking for. If an ultimate decision on
Wade is going to come down to whether the NCAA can prove he engaged in a financial transaction for a player, that could be hard to prove. Conversely, if a wiretap of Wade discussing “strong-ass offers” isn’t evidence of fireable misconduct, what is?
And finally, if all it took for Wade to be reinstated was meeting with LSU and denying everything, why didn’t he do that immediately after the Yahoo Sports report about the contents of the wiretap on March 7?
Wade has changed attorneys since then and seemingly gotten different advice, but a couple of other things have changed, too. For one, college basketball season is over, which means anything that happens with an LSU coach is going to be a relatively minor headline outside of Louisiana for the next six months. Second, LSU’s program has been on the verge of a mass player exodus with Smart, Tremont Waters, Jaz Reid, Emmitt Williams and Skylar Mays — essentially all of the Tigers’ best players — declaring for the NBA draft (they could still decide to come back).
Make no mistake, if LSU has a gutted roster and a vacant coaching position this spring, it’s back to the bottom of the Southeastern Conference for the foreseeable future. And it’s certainly worth wondering whether Alleva, an unpopular athletics director with a fan base that has been on Team #FreeWillWade ever since this debacle started, would even be allowed to make a decision on a new coach if it were to come to that.
In other words, is a panicked and embattled LSU administration willing to dig in for Wade now that he’s said the magic words, or did the decision Sunday buy the administrators time to see what more might come out about Wade in the trial, potentially freeing them of the financial obligation of his buyout?
LSU’s statements only muddied the water in Baton Rouge Sunday night. Somehow, that seems like exactly what they intended to do.