From their coach with the second-best winning percentage in the sport over the past two years to their 21-1 record against conference foes, the McNeese Cowboys aren’t your average mid-major Cinderella hopeful.

To find the face of the team, look no further than who leads it out of the locker room before games.

It isn’t dynamic guard Javohn Garcia, who earlier this month earned Southland Conference Player of the Year honors. Nor is it shot-blocking forward Christian Shumate, who recently was named conference Defensive Player of the Year. A reasonable guess might be Will Wade, the resurgent coach who has gone from federal wiretaps and a firing at LSU to a 49-8 record in two years with his new team.

But it’s not him either.

Rather, the face of the Cowboys is a 5-foot-7, bespectacled, boom box-toting team manager.

IT ALL STARTED with a routine home game for the Cowboys against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in late February. Like Amir Khan has done for every game since joining the team’s manager staff, he hoisted a boom box and led McNeese down the Legacy Center’s locker room tunnel. The opening bars of Lud Foe’s “In & Out,” the chosen soundtrack for that night’s walkout, began to play.

Then something new happened. Khan realized he had the lyrics down pat and instinctively started rapping along. Word for word, bar for bar.

“It’s usually a song that I don’t know,” Khan told ESPN. “This time, it was a little different because I knew the song. [The players] didn’t know that.”

It showed in their reaction. Slowly but surely the players surrounded Khan, encouraging him as he went on.

“It was low-key very shocking,” said junior guard DJ Richards Jr., who picks out the walkout song for each game. “Not too many people know Lud Foe ‘In & Out,’ and for Amir to start singing it, it definitely turned me up.”

Phillip Mitchell Jr., an assistant AD for creative media at McNeese, recorded the scene, quickly panning his camera to focus on the unexpected star of the moment. The walkout soon finished, the players took the court and business resumed as usual. The Cowboys won their sixth straight game 73-57.

Later that night, Mitchell showed special assistant to the head coach Reed Vial the footage, who saw potential for something more.

“I was like, ‘dude, we got to put that on the internet now,'” he recalled.

The decision to post the video on social media proved to be a wise one. The following Monday morning, Mitchell shared the video on his personal X account. Within 12 hours, the clip had over a million views across assorted social media platforms. It would generate millions more over the coming days.

Felt the aura when we opened the app 🔥 @McNeeseMBB

(via @McNeeseMBB)
pic.twitter.com/vlSYkZArwJ

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 15, 2025

“I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought it was a cool moment,” Khan said. “Then Monday [Mitchell] posts the video and my phone starts blowing up.”

The college basketball world couldn’t get enough of Khan. Those who rushed to his bio page on the McNeese athletics website delighted in finding his featured quote: “If they kept manager stats for rebounding and wiping up wet spots on the court, I’d put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers.” Khan’s following on Instagram, X and TikTok all skyrocketed.

Vial quickly worked up a design and printed Amir Khan T-shirts at a local store. Khan’s email was added to his website bio (as well as the nickname “Aura”) as brands from across the country called in to southwest Louisiana in search of potential partnerships with the viral manager. The senior sports management major has since inked deals with a number of companies, including Insomnia Cookies and Buffalo Wild Wings.

The irony of Khan’s unlikely virality? He’ll shoot it to you straight — he’s not much of a natural fit for commercial work.

“I’m a horrible actor,” Khan said. “I only know how to be me, and that’s it.”

But it’s only him that his assorted promotional suitors want. Which is why on March 12, online ticket marketplace TickPick’s first college NIL deal was signed by a manager and not a player.

https://t.co/wgTVxZsOJi pic.twitter.com/fFIp44telR

— TickPick (@TickPick) March 13, 2025

IT’S NOT THE first time McNeese has utilized social media to spark online buzz for its men’s hoops program. It employed a similar tactic upon hiring Wade. Part of generating that momentum, though, meant being willing to push the envelope when promoting the team on social media.

When Wade arrived, he missed the first 10 games due to a suspension levied by the NCAA as part of a punishment for the Level 1 violations that led to his dismissal as head coach of the LSU Tigers in 2022.

“Call it what it is,” Wade told the New York Times last season about his first season with the Cowboys. “There’s a reason we’re all at McNeese.”

McNeese didn’t shy away from Wade’s reputation. It embraced it. In December 2023, ahead of Wade’s first game on the sidelines in Lake Charles, Louisiana, post-suspension, the team released a video captioned “Willy The Kid is free” — a nod to famed Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid — horse, saloon and all.

Willy The Kid is free👀#BayouBandits | #GeauxPokes pic.twitter.com/CvCFJODzrM

— McNeese Men’s Basketball (@McNeeseMBB) December 11, 2023

“When it comes to wanting to be nationally relevant, you know you have to do some of the things that some people don’t want to do,” said Mitchell, who also filmed the Willy The Kid video. “We wanted to embrace the black hat. We know what happened in the past, it’s no secret. But we wanted to embrace that, and we wanted to tell the college basketball world ‘we don’t care. Will Wade is back.'”

The post garnered over 700,000 views. The Cowboys haven’t looked back on the court or online.

“We try to do stuff differently,” Vial said. “Because we know if we do the same as everyone else, we’ll never get seen.”

And while getting seen is nice, as Vial (or anyone around Lake Charles) will tell you, winning is even better. McNeese has done a lot of that since hiring Wade. The Cowboys’ two tournament appearances under his tutelage mark the third and fourth in program history, the cherries on top of an overall win-loss record that includes more than 55 triumphs in two seasons.

IT’S JUST AS well that McNeese has leaned into Wade’s reputation and the unlikely nature of him being the Cowboys coach — because he’s the reason Khan is a manager for the program in the first place.

Khan didn’t plan on becoming a manager. After enrolling at McNeese, he took a mild interest in the basketball team, attending a few games as a sophomore as the Cowboys, the eighth-seeded hosts of the conference tournament, made a brief underdog run to the Southland semifinals.

Five days after McNeese’s conference tournament run ended, the Cowboys had a new coach. Wade was back on the Louisiana college basketball scene. A lifelong LSU fan who “fell in love” with Wade’s squads in Baton Rouge, Khan’s interest in his own school’s program suddenly took on a new intensity. When McNeese’s new staff started putting out feelers for manager roles, he was sold.

“I wanted to work for him in any way that I can,” Khan said. “One of my friends sent me a X post that they had, saying they needed student managers. He was like ‘We should do this; it would be really fun.’ That’s when I decided to do it.”

There was no on-ramp to Khan’s new gig helping a coach he watched so much in his teenage days. Some nerves were inevitable as he found himself immediately immersed in the whirlwind world of a college basketball program’s day-to-day operations. But the proximity of his position to Wade didn’t fully set in until he stood in the Legacy Center’s home locker room on Dec. 13, 2023, listening as the coach gave his first pregame speech as Cowboys coach ahead of an otherwise innocuous nonconference tilt with the Southern Miss Golden Eagles.

“I saw a few of [Wade’s speeches] online at LSU,” Khan said. “But when I got to witness one in person I was like, ‘oh snap, man, this is amazing.'”

However far in the background Khan may have started, there’s little doubt as he finishes his second year as manager how immersed he is with the McNeese program. But what’s next for the Cowboys’ unlikely star? A more prominent role in McNeese’s walkouts was all but a given.

In the team’s final regular-season game against Stephen F. Austin, the Cowboys walked out to Khan’s preferred hype song, “No Flockin,” by rapper Kodak Black. According to Richards, all other future walkout songs will come after consultation with Khan (whose personal taste is more Lil Wayne).

“I’ve been talking to Amir. … I’m going to start sending him songs. It’s just for like 20 seconds, he’s just got to know the songs for like 20 seconds and then we’re going to go out there and just have fun,” Richards said.

Other than walkout duties, though, it’s business as usual for Khan as his school looks to advance on college basketball’s biggest stage.

For Khan, fellow Cowboy managers Landry Donham, Mitchell Eder, Jake Forbes and Jordan Romero, and hundreds of other college basketball managers across the country, the gig is a full-time role that requires being on call 24/7.

Early mornings on rebound duties as players perform shoot drills. Late nights doing laundry after games. Almost anything that might be needed on a given game day — and every day in between — can fall under a manager’s responsibility. In Khan’s case, one of the more specific duties assigned to him after taking the job was carrying the pregame boom box.

No job is too big or too small for managers, who fill all the gaps that come with keeping a college basketball program running smoothly. Regardless of whatever heights his fame may reach, Khan’s tasks will remain the same.

BUT THEREIN LIES the key to why Khan’s virality is so readily accepted by those around McNeese. The story itself is, well, storybook. He’s a native of Lake Charles, a senior who usually toils behind the scenes now getting the spotlight as his hometown school prepares for a national closeup. But he’s not obsessed with the tale. No matter how high social media views or followers climb, Khan remains authentic.

“With someone that puts in the work with us and don’t get credit, when he’s having fun with us, it means a lot to the team. It gives us another reason to want to do good,” Richards said.

“The best part of it, man, is it’s all organic,” Vial said. “Amir’s the same dude.”

Asked about any plans for changing or exaggerating the Cowboys’ walkouts going forward, Khan waves away the notion.

“What got us here is just us being us,” he said. “We’re just going to continue doing us.”

When the Cowboys walk out onto the court to face the fifth-seeded Clemson Tigers on Thursday, they’ll do so in search of history. McNeese men’s basketball has never won an NCAA tournament game in over 50 years of program history.

Yet there is an experience to Khan and the Cowboys that inspires confidence that the moment won’t be too big for them. After all, the only thing that’s changed about McNeese’s pregame entrance since the squad came out of the tunnel for its NCAA tournament game last year against the Gonzaga Bulldogs at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center is the fame of the man holding the boom box.

The opportunity might be distinct, but the routine as the Cowboys walk out to meet it will remain just that: routine.