Pressure is all a relative construct. Even though there were moments this past season where the Indiana Hoosiers looked like a tournament team, it was all for naught under Darian DeVries in his first season at the helm. While not everyone is happy with how things went for him during his first year in Bloomington, at least DeVries is not Will Wade... He can only hope to dream of being Ben McCollum.
CBS Sports' Jon Rothstein reported on Thursday that Wade will leave NC State to head back to LSU.
Sources: LSU will officially part ways with Matt McMahon today and hire NC State's Will Wade as its next head basketball coach.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) March 26, 2026
Wade was previously the head coach of the Tigers from 2017-22.
This is the same head coach who had to leave Baton Rouge the first time due to a scandal. While he did re-invent himself at McNeese previously, he leaves the North Carolina State program in shambles after their quick exit from the NCAA Tournament to Texas in the First Four. Conversely, DeVries' successor at Drake in McCollum has the Iowa Hawkeyes advancing to the Sweet 16 in his first year.
Again, job-hopping can be a bad look for someone, but at least DeVries has not proven to be Wade...
Darian DeVries should be thanking his lucky stars that Will Wade exists
Look. We may live in a different world than before when it comes to college sports. Players come and go as swiftly as they do in the transfer portal. That being said, it is still important to unpack one's suit case and set roots somewhere. When you are trying to build up a program like Indiana, back to the standard of what it should be, you cannot come across as a job-hopper. Authenticity goes a long way.
DeVries tried to rebuild this thing on the fly with a heavy transfer portal class from a season ago. The players played their tails off, but the pieces simply did not mesh together as they probably should have during the latter stages of Big Ten play. If you want to be totally honest with yourself over why Indiana did not make the NCAA Tournament this March, it should not have lost to Northwestern twice.
In the end, while it made sense for DeVries to leave Drake for West Virginia, him spurning Morgantown after only one season has created more enemies for him in the sport than he probably ever wanted. Yes, Indiana is a better job than West Virginia, but you have to look at the optics of everything. This season was still a failure, but at least Wade has made a complete and utter ass of himself yet again...
If DeVries cannot learn vicariously through the errors in Wade's ways, then he may never learn a thing.