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One piece of breaking news from moments ago: Stanford general manager Andrew Luck just announced the firing of two-year head coach Troy Taylor following investigations into hostile behavior. More to come.
As for today:
What a Time: Wade demonstrates speed of change
In college sports, the 2010s began with Cam Newton filling the role of public enemy No. 1. What was his charge? When he’d been a top-tier JUCO prospect, his father had allegedly solicited six figures from Mississippi State before the eventual Heisman winner signed with Auburn. Lots of neutral fans and media members were so mad about that potential breach of the NCAA’s ideals, they missed out on enjoying one of the most entertaining championship teams ever.
For the rest of that decade, though, there was a real sense that people began caring less and less about each amateurism dustup, each revelation that Todd Gurley or Johnny Manziel had made a few bucks from autographs. The NCAA’s presumed moral authority, accumulated bit by bit over the previous century, was melting away in real time all over social media.
Near the end of those 2010s, Yahoo Sports reported right before 2019’s NCAA Tournament that a 2017 FBI wiretap had caught LSU men’s basketball coach Will Wade describing “a strong-ass offer” made toward a recruit.
By that point, it took a spectacular detail like “FBI wiretap” for an amateurism adventure to register as a legitimately big deal. But it also felt like further proof that the NCAA’s situation was beyond untenable, like the bespectacled sheriff from Indianapolis was about to stop admiring his billion-dollar March Madness contract long enough to saddle up for one last job.
Now zoom ahead a little and pretend it’s July 1, 2021. That’d be pretty nice, right? I actually remember the weather was great that day, for one thing. Mainly, that was the day when college sports’ NIL era officially began. Here were two of the things happening at the same power-conference school:
- Superstar LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne launched her NIL empire, soon to include actual ad campaigns on the actual television, by advertising her five-million-strong TikTok account in Times Square. Just a decade after the mortifying six-figure accusation about Newton, Dunne was one of several student-athletes with seven clearly in sight.
- Also, the NCAA was in the middle of a three-year probe into whether LSU’s Wade had sought to network nowhere near seven figures into the hands of a student-athlete.
Simultaneous! LSU: always surreal! (“We were operating at maximum bayou chaos, sure, but it was nothing shocking,” says Pulse newsletter author and mayhem-accustomed Tigers fan Chris Branch. “That might be a bad thing.”) The school would fire Wade a year later, once the NCAA thing finally wrapped up.
OK, now skip ahead to this past week. Wade, in his second year as the head coach at Louisiana’s McNeese State, had the Cowboys in back-to-back NCAA tourneys for the first time in program history. And they might have been the most definitively 2020s college team:
Minutes ago, Wade arrived as NC State’s new head coach, announcing from the podium, “Next year, we’re going to the NCAA Tournament. Make sure you got that on camera.” For a brief moment, the amateurism era overlapped with the NIL era, and then The FBI Wiretap Coach needed just three years to regain a power-conference job. “Aura” is evaluating whether to follow him to Raleigh. What a time.
Quick Snaps
🏈 Two former Michigan athletes — a gymnast and women’s soccer player — sued the school and 2022 Wolverines offensive coordinator Matt Weiss over allegations that he accessed intimate photos by hacking their accounts. More here.
🌸 Notes as spring ball really gets going:
🎯 At next month’s NFL Draft, I wouldn’t be stunned if Ole Miss’ Jaxson Dart becomes the third first-round QB (after Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders). Film guru Ted Nguyen says the 21-year-old “could have the highest ceiling of any quarterback in the draft,” with big caveats.
Ball is Ball: Lower-level winners are still winners
Last week, the Drake Bulldogs upset No. 6 Missouri in the men’s tournament. Drake’s coach, Ben McCollum, had previously been a Division II behemoth, winning all four hoops national titles in Northwest Missouri State’s history — plus entering 2020’s canceled tournament as the No. 1 seed.
Despite that eye-popping record, McCollum faced instant pushback upon entering DI:
“Soon, he was flooded with messages from a group text thread of his best friends, sharing social media posts doubting McCollum. The most common theme: Why was McCollum bringing his Division II players — four of them! — with him to Drake?
“‘We’ve got some receipts,’ McCollum said. ‘I think that’s what all competitors do. I just think they like to be doubted. It forces them to trust themselves even more, immerse themselves even more to the D-II Drake deal.’
“McCollum’s players followed without hesitation. They knew they would win because that’s simply all they’ve known.”
(Iowa has since hired McCollum, and this time, nobody is complaining about the proportion of his wins that have involved directional schools.)
That happens all the time in football, too.
Remember the outcry when Kansas State hired four-time North Dakota State champion Chris Klieman, who’s since won both a Big 12 title and the sport’s highest prize (a Pop-Tart’s corpse)? When Ohio State hired Youngstown State’s dynastic Jim Tressel, then won a BCS title? You could also count other FCS-to-FBS winners like Curt Cignetti, Jim Harbaugh and — like it or not — Deion Sanders, along with former Division III juggernaut Lance Leipold. It doesn’t always work, but nothing always works. 👍
I’m not a very smart person, so I tend to evaluate coaching hires by first looking at their win-loss records as college coaches. If it looks good, I don’t worry much about the level. If you can get 11 guys to beat 11 equally sized guys, you can probably keep doing that as both your guys and their guys get larger.
This is a double-edged thing, because treating lower levels of college football as truly valid would also lead to more FBS teams poaching from those schools. I think there’s still a trade-off, though. More people know of Youngstown because of Tressel’s Ohio State run than because of what he actually did as a Penguin. Now if we could just learn to appreciate small-school winners while they’re actually at small schools.
- One area in which powers have no problem with raiding FCS and DII teams: the transfer portal. Manny Navarro ranked this year’s most important risers, led by new Kentucky edge Mi’Quise Humphrey-Grace and Iowa QB Mark Gronowski, both by way of the beautiful state of South Dakota.
One Shining Moment
Drake University:
— Gravy Crockett (@bostonjerry.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 10:04 PM
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(Top photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
