There was no denying the hard truth of the numbers.
A talent-laden McNeese basketball team fired in a season-high 16 3-pointers, and sank them at a season-best 55 percent Monday night in Prather Coliseum.
Playing on its homecourt, Northwestern State sank a commendable eight from distance, at a comparatively mediocre 32 percent rate.
The Cowboys’ 3-point barrage provided a huge 24-point advantage from behind the arc. That was the difference in a 23-point victory by the defending Southland Conference champions, who won for the 21st time in 22 league games in Will Wade’s second season as their head coach. It was a school-record 15th straight Southland W dating back to last season, when McNeese went 30-4 overall.
This year the record is 10-5 but likely to balloon to 28-5 or so, assuming another cruise through the conference and two wins in the SLC Tournament (conveniently already booked for McNeese’s Legacy Center), earning a second straight NCAA Tournament appearance. Anything less would be a massive letdown.
Reading Monday’s box score, or just watching the contest between two old rivals entering the night 3-0 in the 20-game conference race, it was plain to see: McNeese’s exceptional aim on treys was the pivotal factor in their 92-69 romp. It was unexpected. The Cowboys are not sharpshooters. They have twice made just one 3-pointer and were averaging just 6.6 per game.
But another set of numbers, not readily accessible, was a more decisive factor.
The numbers, as in dollars, in the Cowboys’ NIL pot, The Ranch Collective, which has helped Wade assemble players who last season wore uniforms for Syracuse, Providence, Arizona State, Ole Miss and Saint Louis.
The NIL money provides a South Beach sheen when transfer portal players consider relocating to Lake Charles. Some believe McNeese has as much as $1.5 million to share with its top talent, although Cowboys’ athletic director Heath Schroyer scoffed at that figure Monday (“that’s way overexaggerated, way overexaggerated,“ he said). One well-connected source said it’s about $1.1 million, which is probably close to a million or so more than Northwestern has been able to muster.
Schroyer doesn’t run the NIL pool, but he’s justifiably proud of it. The Ranch Collective board of directors is very attuned to the needs of their football and basketball coaches.
“Anybody in college athletics today understands the importance of having NIL and a collective. We work really hard at it, we educate our donors about it, we educate our student-athletes about it. It’s the way of the world,” he said. “The only thing that’s guaranteed in life, let alone in college athletics, is change. When I coached, there was no NIL, but you have to learn to adapt, and I wanted to be on the forefront of that.”
NIL’s emergence has made legal what got Wade in hot water when he was wildly successful on the court as head coach at LSU. He became known around college hoops as “the American Gangster” for his wheeling and allegedly-shady dealing as the Tigers coach. He and McNeese lean into that identity. The team is billed as the “Bayou Bandits” and his nickname is cited in the second sentence of his bio in the Cowboys’ game notes.
Although he is still an outlaw in some eyes, he’s a charming one. He maintains plenty of friendships rooted in the LSU program, and no small amount of McNeese’s NIL money flows west across the Atchafayala Basin. Wade coaches hard, but smiles quickly. And why not? He got a reconfigured contract late in his first season at McNeese, upping his salary to a $700,000 base, and he’s got a shiny new arena, a deep NIL pool, an adoring fan base, and not much in the way of serious competition on the road to March Madness.
Decimal point job offers are inevitable. Wade’s hand is so stacked he’s able to wait for a prime upgrade.
“We made this job the next job,” said Schroyer. “We have a lot of people who are very, very committed to men’s basketball, and that was evident with the (new) contract.”
And with The Ranch Collective, which allows Cowboy fans to dream of Big Dances.
“No matter where you are in college athletics, you have to figure out how to get sustainable income into NIL,” Schroyer said, noting that McNeese and its fan base view NIL as a justifiable ROI due to “the impact athletics has on student experiences and of course, enrollment, and for us to have a really good team, all those things have to be in place.”
What McNeese has that other Southland programs don’t is the lucrative petrochemical industry around Lake Charles. Not even a series of vicious hurricanes have knocked the surging economy off its uptick.
There’s no comparable economic engine around Natchitoches, or for that matter, in the 318 area code, until the Meta data center development begins in September 30 miles northeast of Monroe, with a 2030 completion target. Two smaller centers on the drawing board for central Louisiana might locate a bit closer to Cane River.
But in a best-case scenario, not soon enough. Somehow, some way, not only Northwestern but all north Louisiana Division I athletic programs have to navigate the NIL swamp until the landscape of college athletics gets reconfigured sometime this decade.
Until some genius develops the antidote, the inconvenient truth is the programs who can find donors to contribute to their favorite school’s NIL collective will narrow the degree of difficulty in keeping up with the competition. It’s not an impossible hill to climb, just a tall one. The biggest NIL accounts don’t guarantee success – look at SEC football this year for cases in point.
The current climate, like this bitter blast of winter, is harsh to contemplate. But with the right combination of shrewd management, savvy coaching and a loyal, generous corps of supporters, winning can happen anywhere, said Wade, minutes after squaring off with another second-year Southland coach, NSU’s Rick Cabrera.
“The formula is different at every school. Coach Cabrera has the perfect formula for here – he’s a former junior college coach. He’s the right man for the job. I’ve known him for a long, long time. He’s got great connections, is a great coach, does a great job making moves in the game, and I think they’ll have really, really good days ahead here.”
If not for the Cowboys’ out-of-character long-distance aim, Monday might have been one of them.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com