By Charles Hanagriff
It was an impressive looking post on X.
Eleven of LSU’s spring sports teams are in the Top 25 nationally. The baseball, gymnastics and softball teams are in the Top 5. Women’s basketball, men’s golf, beach volleyball, women’s indoor track and women’s tennis are in the Top 10.
Women’s golf cracked the top 20. The men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams are ranked 22nd and 20th respectively.
Absent, once again, was men’s basketball, the only spring sport guaranteed to turn a profit.
Winners of their last two games, the Tigers are unlikely to finish last in the SEC regular season standings. However, with the five remaining games on their schedule all against ranked opponents, it’s certainly possible that they have won for the last time this year.
This week, some excellent reporting by Shea Dixon of On3 revealed that Athletic Director Scott Woodward intends to bring head coach Matt McMahon back for a fourth season in Baton Rouge. Dixon also reports that LSU intends to drastically increase the amount of NIL money that the men’s basketball team will receive.
The move is intended to reverse a massive mistake that LSU made in the first place. Not the hiring of McMahon, whose resume was worthy of a power conference job at the time, but the pitiful funding that the school expected him to succeed with.
According to the report, LSU men’s basketball is at or close to the bottom in NIL revenue in the SEC, and the results have been predictable. Nearing the end of his third season, McMahon’s Tigers have the worst record in the league in SEC play over that period, two games behind 13th place Georgia (Texas and Oklahoma excluded).
Not enough money, not enough players. Such is college athletics in 2025.
Woodward’s gamble is this: he is taking his money and putting it behind the coach, rather than using it to buy him out. LSU should be somewhere in the middle of the SEC in hoops NIL next season.
Will it be enough? It’s OK to remain optimistic while acknowledging the serious hill the Tigers have to climb.
Matt McMahon won 70 percent of his games in his seven years at Murray St and 75 percent of his league games. His teams won or shared the conference title five times, and they advanced to the NCAA Tournament in three of the six years it was held during his tenure.
Was the playing field level? Sometimes. Two of those seasons, McMahon was blessed with Ja Morant, one of the top amateur basketball players in the world, and even as a teenager someone who looked like he belonged on an NBA roster more than one at Murray St.
But McMahon didn’t just ride Morant’s coattails into this job–a popular, but false, assumption by McMahon’s detractors.
Murray St won 73 percent of their overall games, and 77 percent of their conference games over three seasons under McMahon AFTER Morant left for the Memphis Grizzlies.
That is evidence that McMahon, with comparable resources, can be a successful coach. Asking him to be successful with less than half the resources (can we just call it money?) of his competitors is too much to ask anyone.
McMahon is not totally off the hook for the record though. There are some major questions to ask about his future.
Start with recruiting. It would probably surprise most that McMahon has three national top 20 high school recruiting classes in his four cycles in Baton Rouge. The stat actually works against him. LSU has received nothing close to top 20 production out of those groups so far.
Bad evaluations? Poor development? Doesn’t matter, because either way, that is on the coach. It’s reasonable to ask that if he has a top 20 transfer portal class with this influx of capital, can he translate that into wins?
The next thing is fundraising. Coaches today must work this more than ever, and McMahon simply has not done it well. The administration has been lacking in their financial support of the program, something they finally admitted this week, but McMahon has not taken enough initiative here either.
LSU basketball is a unique entity on the campus. Football gets, as it should, the majority of the attention. Skip Bertman built a baseball monster that still demands feeding nearly a quarter century after he coached his last game.
Gymnastics is a powerhouse, the defending national champion. The women’s basketball team is led by a coach who was introduced at the Hall of Fame by Michael Jordan.
It may not be McMahon’s style, but if he doesn’t push the issue, it is easy to forget about men’s hoops.
Dale Brown understood that, and it’s why he remains the most successful coach in program history. He wouldn’t stop until basketball was acknowledged.
Asking McMahon to be like Brown would be like asking an aspiring vocalist to sing like Taylor Swift. There is only one Swift, and there was only one Brown. But it is reasonable to ask him to be more aggressive, from recruiting to fundraising to promoting and so on.
Back to Woodward who just finished a white-hot fundraising effort to help get the football team into the playoffs next season. He is trying to buck recent history.
In the last 15 years, there have been ample examples of SEC basketball coaches that were not successful through three seasons. Some of them got a fourth year, some did not, but none of them kept their job long term. Here are some comps to McMahon.
Records are SEC only.
Auburn: Tony Barbee 3 yr record: 12-38 4th yr 6-12
Alabama: Avery Johnson 3 yr record: 26-28 4th yr 8-10
Ole Miss: Kermit Davis 3 yr record: 26-28 4th and 5th yr 7-29
Miss St: Ben Howland 3 yr record: 22-32 4th yr 10-8 5th yr 11-7 6th yr 8-10
Rick Ray 3 yr record: 13-41 fired before 4th year
Georgia: Tom Crean 3 yr record: 14-40 4th yr 1-17
South Carolina: Lamont Paris 3 yr record 17-32..4th yr ???
Vanderbilt: Bryce Drew 3 yr record 16-38 fired before 4th year
Jerry Stackhouse 3 yr record 17-46 4th and 5th yr 15-21
Missouri: Cuonzo Martin 3 yr record 22-32 4th and 5th year 13-21
Dennis Gates 3 yr record 19-29…trending up
Howland and Martin likely got additional years because of their prior success. Howland took four different teams to the tournament and went to three straight Final Four’s at UCLA. Martin had previously led Tennessee to the Sweet Sixteen.
Stackhouse saved himself in year four with an 11-7 conference record but regressed to 4-14 the next season and was fired.
Gates is moving in the right direction at Missouri, who was 0-18 in SEC play last year but will be a tournament team this year in an impressive turnaround.
The most glaring stat is this one: of all these coaches that had three bad seasons to start, none of them ever won an NCAA Tournament game at that SEC school.
In other words, if McMahon shakes off three losing seasons (14-30) and becomes a winner, he will have broken a major trend. In fairness, most of these examples happened before NIL became rule.
It’s a crossroads for LSU basketball. The AD has put his faith in the coach, and he has one year to produce. The SEC is the strongest that it has ever been, maybe the strongest any conference has ever been, but the turnarounds at Missouri and Vanderbilt, among others, prove that rebuilding is no longer a multi-year undertaking.
The ball is in McMahon’s court.
