Fog surrounds LSU’s men’s basketball team as it rushes to fill out a roster

Will Wade was introduced as LSU’s new basketball coach in March. Mitchell Scaglione/LSU Athletics/Getty Images Basketball See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Threads Link Copied! Follow Birmingham, Alabama —  Dense fog rolled into Baton Rouge on Tuesday morning, bad enough to earn an advisory from the Weather Channel, and thick enough to do the one thing no one else in college athletics seemingly can do: Stop LSU.

The Tigers’ entourage, scheduled to appear here for SEC Basketball Media Day, could not take off due to the fog, grounding them for their session, the league announced.

Who says Mother Nature doesn’t have a sense of humor? A program shrouded in controversy, willing to bring all the smoke and run around like college sports’ Pigpen (of Peanuts fame), gets stuck in Baton Rouge because of fog.

“Next year maybe we’ll all have a little fog, right?” one coach said with a chuckle.

One month after football coach Lane Kiffin fought to suit up two would-be NFL players in a college game, LSU men’s basketball coach Will Wade is attempting to build a roster with two players who went through the NBA Draft process, two others who have played professionally overseas and two who are part of court orders seeking eligibility for fifth-year college players (Donovan Dent has been granted an injunction; Skyy Clark has not).

The man who, in his first iteration at LSU got fired for making “strong-ass” offers against NCAA rules, now says he is simply being “unconventional” in his attempt to flout loopholes and lean into injunctions.

DAYTON, OHIO – MARCH 17: Musa Sagnia #13 of the NC State Wolfpack reacts with head coach Will Wade against the Texas Longhorns during the second half in the First Four game of the 2026 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at UD Arena on March 17, 2026 in Dayton, Ohio. (Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images) Dylan Buell/Getty Images LSU basketball gets back with its ex. It’s as messy as it sounds

Wade’s unconventional attempt at roster building is, in order, against SEC rules, against NCAA rules and contingent on courts ordering against the NCAA, which is currently 3-0 in appeals. The upshot: Three weeks before its first real game, LSU has 10 players listed on its webpage. Along with Dent, whose status could change on appeal, one is the son of his assistant coach, and another is a 5-foot-10-inch, 150-pound freshman.

“We’ll have a few more guys eligible for our next exhibition game tomorrow,” Wade said on the SEC Network via Zoom. “And we anticipate building this thing as we head toward November 13.”

There is no evidence that that will, in fact, happen.

Pressed by a reporter on a Zoom call about specific players, Wade grew agitated and defiant. But in his tirade of a response, he also said some truths.

One: RJ Luis “is not rostered.” Luis, the one-time Big East Player of the Year who signed multiple NBA contracts, won a court injunction in August allowing him to play, but Wade said the school was “following SEC protocols,” which includes prohibiting players who have signed pro deals to compete. Two: Marcio Santos is officially gone, having left LSU to sign a pro deal in Spain.

RJ Luis Jr. plays for St. John’s during last year’s Big East tournament. Frank Franklin II/AP To be clear, LSU is not alone. Back in the day, coaches hit the courts in Las Vegas and at Peach Jam, the summer recruiting locales, to find players. Now, they await word from the actual courts.

As coaches took the podium here, a judge in Colorado was hearing an NCAA appeal about the eligibility of thousands of would-be fifth years. Missouri coach Dennis Gates moved up his appearance here by a day so he could join Mark Mitchell, who signed what’s called an NBA Exhibit 10 contract, at a hearing on Wednesday to determine if he could play. Tennessee’s Jalen Washington remains ineligible after the NCAA won a stay on a temporary injunction that would have allowed the Vanderbilt transfer to play.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma coach Porter Moser opened his remarks by saying he was excited to talk “retention,” but admitted that to keep players he had to “shrink the gap.” In other words, scrounge up more money.

With its small numbers, college basketball is especially susceptible to the high risk/high reward world of current roster construction. But Wade is not assuming risk; he is all in. Whereas Kiffin was trying to clear two guys on roster of 105, he is rolling the dice on what will be the difference between fielding an actual SEC team or a glorified CYO program. And he is doing it after the SEC threatened everything up to, and including, expulsion if Kiffin didn’t back down.

Already poked, the league bear hasn’t exactly gone into hibernation, either. The SEC’s lawsuit is still out there, the league due to file a response to LSU’s motion to dismiss on Tuesday, and one of the players Wade is trying to clear, Saliou Niang, was drafted 58th by the Cavaliers. Though he didn’t sign a pro contract, the SEC policy says that any athlete who has “previously declared for the NFL, NBA or WNBA and did not properly withdraw” cannot compete.

Saliou Niang scores for Italy during a Eurobasket match in Latvia in September 2025. Sergei Grits/AP But LSU is as all-in as its coach. As with Kiffin, when the governor shoved former athletic director Scott Woodward out the door when he balked at hiring the coveted coach and all of his baggage, LSU has greased the skids for Wade. He is surrounded by people who gave him his initial cleanse.

A year after LSU fired Wade amid an NCAA investigation that included five Level I violations, McNeese State hired him, doubling down on his renegade reputation. In a marketing campaign, Wade donned a black cowboy hat.

The university president who OK’d the hire at McNeese – Wade Rousse — is now the president at LSU. A wealthy construction company owner who befriended Wade while he was in Lake Charles, Lee Mallett, is now LSU’s chairman of the board, and Wade’s former athletic director, Heath Schroyer, is now not just a senior associate AD for the Tigers. Wade’s contract specifies that he reports directly to Schroyer, and not AD Verge Ausberry.

These are his people, and if they don’t necessarily endorse the renegade, they don’t mind Will being Will. At a local rotary club meaning, he joked about joining Kiffin on staff, saying he’s no longer the most controversial coach on campus, and zinged his own checkered pass.

“Everyone says it’s ‘name, image and likeness,’” he said of NIL. “I say, it’s ‘now it’s legal.’”

Nor has he backed down on the risk he’s taking, arguing that it will beat the 3-15 league finish from a year ago.

“So I mean, hell, what’s the downside?” he said earlier this year. “We’re giving ourselves a chance at incredible upside, and if we’re no good, all right, we just have to live through one more bad year. We’ve had a few of them.”

LSU basketball coach Will Wade attends a Tigers football game last month. Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images This is about nothing more – or less – than winning. Five years ago, LSU brought Kim Mulkey in to resuscitate its women’s basketball program, ignoring the controversy that trailed her like a train of sequins off one of her gaudy pantsuits. Two years later, she won them a national title.

The football team hasn’t won a national title since 2019. LSU opened the season ranked 11th. The basketball team has never won it all, but Wade turned the Tigers relevant for the first time since Shaq and Dale Brown. In five seasons, he went to three NCAA Tournaments and won the SEC regular-season title in 2019.