PROVIDENCE – McNeese men’s basketball coach Will Wade wiped away tears after his team’s 76-62 loss to Purdue in the second round of the NCAA tournament, saying he wasn’t yet ready to look ahead to taking over at NC State.

“I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I’m an honest guy but today I want to put a bow on everything with McNeese if we can,” said Wade, who won 58 games and went 36-2 in the Southland Conference over the last two seasons, capturing back-to-back regular-season and conference tournament titles.

“Not to try to give out a canned answer, but this is about our players and McNeese now. We’re not flying back until tomorrow morning. We’ll enjoy this here and when we get back, we’ll figure out next steps.”

For Wade and the McNeese players with eligibility remaining, they are less than 48 hours from the scramble of the NCAA transfer portal opening on Monday.

Wade will be attempting to lure a new roster to NC State and Wade’s players will be deciding whether to stay in Lake Charles, Louisiana, or depart for other opportunities. The cruelty of March is the suddenness of the endings, the sonic boom of attention garnered by a double-digit seed authoring an upset soon followed by uncertainty and high-stakes decisions.

McNeese beat No. 5 Clemson, 69-67, in the first round for the school’s first-ever NCAA tournament victory, which school president Dr. Wade Rousse had called the “biggest day in our school history, or one of them, for sure.” Rousse said the school’s website crashed that day.

It was clear early Saturday that another upset wasn’t in the cards.

“Purdue was more aggressive from the start,” said Wade, whose team led just once, 35 seconds into the game, 3-2. “They were tougher and more aggressive than we were and we thought we were [that in the first round]. We couldn’t carry that over. We couldn’t fill our tanks back up quick enough to bring that again.”

Despite his impending departure to NC State, Wade shared his view on the Cowboys’ future.

“Our program at McNeese is in great shape. We have tremendous leadership. We’re not dumb. We have a plan to keep this program rolling, whoever is at the helm, and this program is going to keep moving in the right direction,” he said.

“Most of the time you lose a tournament, fans are ready to fire you. Our people were applauding us.”