Will Wade didn’t have to change for NC State. College basketball changed to meet him
The fact that it no longer requires an ethical bypass at birth to even consider hiring Will Wade probably says as much about the current state of college athletics as it does N.C. State’s impending decision to hire the once-disgraced coach.
In a world where a “strong-ass offer,” to use Wade’s most infamous phrasing, is the order of the day, hiring a guy with a proven record of buying players is no longer skulduggery but pragmatism.
After serving his two years of exile at McNeese State — where former Mark Gottfried assistant coach Heath Schroyer gave him his ticket back into basketball, in the small-world department, and where he’s won exactly as much as you would expect him to win — the wiretaps and affidavits that ensnared Wade in the ill-fated federal investigation of college basketball and cost him his job at LSU are as forgotten as that entire misbegotten endeavor.
The FBI’s bombshell investigation fizzled to nothing, a few poor scapegoats served actual jail time while all the kingpins escaped, and courts and legislatures ended up forcing the NCAA to make all the illegal stuff legal.
Wade’s loss is suddenly N.C. State’s victory, landing perhaps the most coveted candidate in the hiring cycle, beating SEC schools to the punch. Whatever his methods, sound or unsound, the man lands recruits and wins basketball games.
The real question about hiring Wade is whether N.C. State is prepared — or capable — of putting the resources behind him to compete not only in the ACC but nationally.
The advantage Wade and the Wolfpack would have is that there appear to be very few schools in the ACC that seem to understand what it takes to win in basketball in this era and also the commitment to do it. Duke and Louisville, for sure. Maybe Pittsburgh and Wake Forest. Possibly Virginia, post-Tony Bennett, who gave up his fight against the tide. SMU has money to burn.
But North Carolina is only now getting serious about it, and even then there’s going to be a fight for resources between basketball and Belichickball. Schools like Clemson and Florida State and Miami and Notre Dame are always going to be football schools, no matter how much Brad Brownell wins. Boston College is a hockey school. We’ll see about Syracuse, which is always facing the existential crisis of whether it’s a basketball school or a lacrosse school.
With a finite pool of money to spend on athletes in the wake of the House settlement — $20 million or so, for the schools that spend the max, plus “fair market value” NIL deals, as if anyone can honestly define that — how that pool is split up is going to separate out the basketball pretenders pretty quickly.
There’s an opening here for N.C. State. If last year’s miraculous postseason run is going to have any long-term impact on N.C. State basketball with Kevin Keatts fired, it’s going to be how it reminded fans and boosters that, despite what Chuck Amato and Dave Doeren would have you believe and a few fleeting moments of glory, State is still a basketball school at heart.
Why chase success in football, a rigged game you can never win, when basketball success is relatively affordable, within reach and what your fans really want anyway?
If it puts the right resources behind Wade, N.C. State has everything it needs to be in the upper echelon of the ACC consistently, on a year-to-year basis. What happened last spring can become the norm, not the exception.
The man can coach. He can recruit. Everything that was illegal is now legal. There are no NCAA rules left to break, only basketball games to win.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at www.newsobserver.com/newsletters to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 12:19 PM with the headline "Will Wade didn’t have to change for NC State. College basketball changed to meet him."
