When Will Wade uttered that now prescient prediction of 23 wins for his McNeese Cowboys when he was hired last spring, he had a loftier goal in mind for his return to coaching.
The affable but intense Wade chuckles when he admits 23 was the number because that’s how many the troubled program lost last season. But Wade was looking beyond 23 Ws or even 24, 25 or 26 victories.
The veteran coach, now with 10 years as a head man and 200-plus career wins, had a championship on his mind and knew he had assembled a talented crew that could take the Southland Conference in his first season.
Maybe that’s why Wade recently went on a classic coach’s diatribe on the Cowboys’ flaws, mistakes and shortcomings, along with some other pointed descriptions of their recent play, which was admittedly good enough for two recent blowout wins over Northwestern State and U.N.O. but far below his standards.
That’s pretty doggone impressive to the victory-starved McNeese fans who are floating on cloud nine right about now, but far from what Wade is expecting to see from his Cowboys on a game-by-game basis. I won’t go as far as to say Wade can tell the future, but he must have pulled out some Tarot cards recently regarding what could happen down the road if they don’t “get our stuff tight”.
“This is fool’s gold right now,“ Wade explained after the 8-0 league start. “If we take that effort on the road Saturday at Southeastern, it will be a loss. Kiss the winning streak all that other stuff you (media) like to write about … kiss it goodbye.”
“If we want to be the team we are capable of, this ain’t it. This ain’t it, period. Until we get it fixed, we are going to wallow through things, lose a couple of games on the road. Maybe that will teach us what we need to learn,” Wade said back on January 29.
His foreshadowing then came to pass on that recent road trip to Hammond, where the Cowboys dropped their first conference game 77-74, snapping what was then the nation’s longest winning streak among Division 1 teams at 14 straight.
Over the past week or so, Wade has lamented about lethargic game warmups, defensive rotations, leaving open shooters to toss up uncontested threes and shots on the rim getting “punched.” His concerns also focused on an inconsistent two-point offense and lack of attention to detail.
“This is simply not good enough,” Wade bellowed after that 24-point home win over the Demons that put McNeese at 19-2 overall and unbeaten at 8-0 in the SLC. “We didn’t play well against New Orleans (chalk up a 37-point runaway over UNO). Same rotation problems. We were able to get out in transition and dunk a few balls, everybody gets excited, but it masks all the other issues. We have some real basketball issues that we better get fixed.”
The rematch with Texas A&M-Commerce, the league’s last-place team, set the stage on whether Wade’s harsh message finally got through. Apparently, it did, as the Cowboys overcame another slow start but behind a second-half barrage of three-pointers and a tough, sticky defense blew by the Lions 77-51.
I’m not sure the sour taste of losing at Southeastern was completely cleansed for Wade, but his mood and team critique was much more positive.
“I thought our response was tremendous. I thought our guys were connected. I thought our guys were locked in and our defensive effort was much better. Our rotations were crisper. Our rotations were quicker. Overall, I was very, very pleased,” Wade said after the Commerce win with a hint of a smile.
The Cowboys, to a man, have talked about “maybe getting too comfortable” as the wins mounted but all the while their head coach did everything he could to shake them back to reality. He would have preferred to avoid a defeat in this learning curve process, but his Pokes were more hardheaded than he would have liked.
“Losing. It’s that simple. I couldn’t get the message through last week after we won. Losing has a way of sending a message,” Wade explained. “We tried to solve it (sloppy play) through winning, but we couldn’t solve it through winning. Sometimes you have to take harsh lessons. Losing is sometimes the way to get those lessons.”
McNeese senior leader Shahada Wells and senior guard Mike Saunders admitted a recent practice with no laughing or joking around along with a scathing film session from the Southeastern loss directed by Wade got their heads right. “We figured out what we needed to do. Coach saw it before we did, and that loss really opened our eyes to what we needed to do,” says Wells.
It might be too easy to say the Cowboys were getting complacent and maybe over-confident during the win streak and garnering votes for the AP national Top 25 rankings.
“Going against human nature and not getting comfortable. We just got to stay on our toes, and it’s easy to relax and we have to go about every day and understand that teams are coming for us,” says star forward Christian Shumate.
Coaches usually don’t try and reinvent the wheel. If they see how one or two teams attack and find success against, say, these Cowboys, then they will be quick to copycat that game plan. Wade admits teams in the conference are trying to slow the pace of offense in hopes of containing McNeese’s scoring, which is in the upper tier of the NCAA averaging nearly 80 points a game and at one point a 19-point average scoring margin.
One critical difference in the Southeastern loss was simply three-point shooting. I’ve always said you can live by the trey and die by it, as well. In the first half, the Cowboys couldn’t get a three-pointer to fall, while the Lions at one point in the half were sinking 70 percent from long range and from the field.
That torrid pace had to wane in the second half, which it did, while McNeese’s shooting and defense improved. A 15-point Southeastern lead shrank to one point with 13 seconds to play, and two open three-point looks in the waning seconds failed to fall for Javohn Garcia as the Cowboys felt the sting of defeat for the first time since Nov. 22 at La. Tech.
“The standard by which we are playing isn’t where it needs to be, and we better get it fixed,” Wade complained back on Jan. 29, and added that every player in his locker room is very aware of his feelings.
After the Demons game, in one of his more animated press conferences, Wade said his players were “prancing around like everything is cool” while the days tick down to Selection Sunday for the NCAA Tournament.
One can see that McNeese’s first year head coach, who has flipped the script on this historically losing program in a matter of months (not years), has far higher goals than just 23-plus wins.
Wade has his sights set on winning the regular season conference title, the Southland Tournament Championship and securing McNeese’s first NCAA March Madness bid in over 20 years.
But he will continue to pound home his message that the standards of play are not being met right now, which puts all those aforementioned goals in jeopardy.
“We haven’t played anywhere near our standards. The closest was probably Michigan (McNeese defeated Michigan in Ann Arbor 87-76 on Dec. 29 ). We were locked in and ready to go, but we’ve been sloppy since then. We’ve been sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.”
That triple take on being sloppy is not lost on his players. Wade has a way of controlling a locker room, so you can bet the team felt his ire and frustration.
“He loves us and we love that he loves us. He wants the best for every last one of us. That’s why we are OK with how hard he is on us, because we know he only wants the best for us,” admitted forward D.J. Richards. “We are going to fix this with him. We are going to do it together, even though he is yelling at us. We’re going to figure it out.”
With the conference schedule half over, the wake-up call came in the nick of time. McNeese has yet to play Nicholls, plus there are tough road games ahead at Lamar, Houston Christian and New Orleans. All four of them would like to make the Cowboys as uncomfortable as possible.
Catch Rick Sarro’s commentary and latest opinions on Soundoff on CBS Lake Charles Tueday and Thursday nights at 10:05 pm and again Saturday at 11 pm and Sunday at 10 pm. Follow Rick on Twitter @ricksarro.
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