NC State Head Coaching Search: Will Wade’s Postgame Press Conference After McNeese St.’s 69-67 Upset of Clemson in the NCAAT

The world got to see what NC State is getting in there next Head Men’s Basketball Coach today, with Will Wade leading #12 seed McNeese St. to a 69-67 upset over #5 seed Clemson in the 1st round of the 2025 NCAA Tournament today. Wade met with the media after the game for his postgame press conference. You can watch the video above, and read what he had to say below.

Just a great game for us. Our first half was pretty flawless defensively. We’ve been saving that zone all year.

We hadn’t played it. We hadn’t played the 2-3 zone all year. We just kind of put it in for some stuff in the conference tournament, but we never used it. We thought this would be a good time to pull it out, and so our guys did a great job executing.

We hit our benchmarks. Under Brownell, I think they’re 4-15 when you can assist on 12-plus baskets and they shoot under 53% from two, and under 38% from three, and so we hit all three benchmarks. I left out the 38% because y’all are gonna be hugged up to three point shooters. I left that out, but I got what I wanted anyway.

We hit all three of the benchmarks that it takes to beat them, and luckily we gave ourselves enough margin in the first half that we could withstand their run in the second half. But to outscore them by 20 in the paint, out-rebound them, just phenomenal.

Coach, just talk about your kind of emotions for the last 24 hours.

I mean, I’ve been focused on the game. I’ve been on-one about the game. So whatever else is happening, that’s of no distraction to us.

I know everybody else thinks that there’s distractions. We operate the same way all the time, so we haven’t operated any differently.

The walkthrough…nothing’s been any different. There hasn’t been a lot of emotion. It’s been narrow focus.

The bigger the game, the narrower your focus, and it’s been absolute narrow focus on winning our first NCAA tournament game at McNeese St. and continuing to change. This is just huge for our school.

Our enrollment’s up 3%. Our applications are up 10%, and we’ve gotten freaking $25 million worth of free advertising the last couple weeks.

Our stuff’s going to go through the roof. It’s going to change our area. It changes our five parish area.

It changes everything. That’s what our focus has been. We’ve broken every record in the book.

This was the last one to get. We want to keep this going.

Will, you want to share with us what you said to Cope (Quadir Copeland) there?

Oh, they always think I’m too honest.

Copeland says I’m too honest. He said you can sugarcoat it a little bit sometimes, coach. You don’t have to be quite that honest with everything.

So I was joking with him about that.

You jumped into the stands there after the game was over. What kind of led you to do that there, and where does that moment rank in your coaching career?

Pretty high. I mean, just my president and athletic director here who have been incredible.

Our biggest supporters were right there on the front row, so why not? Why not? I mean, just incredible. It’s a hard trip from – I don’t know if you’ve tried to get from Lake Charles to Providence. It’s not an easy trip.

To have so many folks here, and I’m sure we’ll have way more come on Saturday. Look, I’m the head coach, but there’s a lot of people that make this thing happen. I’m low on the totem pole of what actually makes all this work.

First and foremost it’s the players, and then you’ve got the donors that allow us to get the players. All that stuff works together. I’ve got an unbelievable president and athletic director and just our entire administration.

So everybody deserves this. They’ve gone all in on our basketball program since the day we got there, and everybody deserves it.

They all thought we were a little wacky when we did it, but hey, who’s laughing now?