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Myron Medcalf
Multiple Authors
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — RJ Luis Jr., the 2025 Big East player of the year who previously signed contracts with NBA teams, is not a member of LSU’s 2026-27 team amid eligibility concerns, coach Will Wade said Tuesday.
Wade, who spoke to reporters via a video call after his flight to SEC media days was canceled due to dense fog, said his team will follow SEC “protocols” despite Luis winning a preliminary injunction in a Louisiana court that gave him clearance to play this season after signing multiple two-way deals in the NBA.
“We’re going to follow all the SEC protocols with him,” Wade told reporters. “I think it’s been pretty clear what the SEC protocols all are on that. He didn’t travel with us to [our exhibition against McNeese], and he hasn’t been rostered.”
That’s a major development for a team already facing questions about its roster.
Wade had celebrated with Luis, a 6-foot-7 standout who averaged 18.2 points and earned second team Associated Press All-American honors during the 2024-25 season, after he won a judgment in a local court despite previously signing contracts with the Utah Jazz and Boston Celtics. He never ended up playing in an NBA game.
Multiple fifth-year and international players on Wade’s roster continue to face eligibility concerns, too. Before this week, only four players were listed on the LSU men’s basketball roster. That number climbed to 10 players ahead of SEC media day in Birmingham on Tuesday. The current “official” LSU roster features multiple walk-ons.
But Wade said Tuesday that he’s “confident” he will have a strong roster when his squad suits up for its first game Nov. 3 against LSU New Orleans. Wade used seven players in his team’s 63-60 exhibition win over McNeese last week.
“We’ve got a pretty good idea of who we’re going to play. We’ve got a pretty good idea of who is going to be eligible,” Wade said on SEC Network. “We don’t worry about what anybody else is saying. We’ll see how it all shakes out. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. It’s on me. I’m the one who made the decisions. But we feel very confident with the guys we have. With our full roster, we will have a puncher’s chance in all of the games we’ll play.”
LSU was picked to finish 14th out of 16 teams in the SEC preseason poll released Monday. Former UCLA standouts Donovan Dent and Skyy Clark have secured clearance to play a fifth season through a court case in California. But the NCAA has vowed to fight such cases, and it has successfully won multiple reversals in rulings that had previously allowed multiple fifth-year players to compete. Clark was not listed on LSU’s official roster as of Tuesday afternoon, but Dent was.
International prospects Saliou Niang, the 58th pick in the 2025 NBA draft, and Brice Dessert, who went undrafted in 2025, committed to LSU earlier this year. But a new SEC rule that bans players who’d previously entered the draft “without properly withdrawing” could complicate the road ahead for those players even though they never played in the NBA. Neither player is on the official LSU roster.
Marcio Santos, an international prospect who’d also committed to LSU earlier this year, elected to return to Europe in September. Michael Ruzic, a Croatian prospect, is listed on the team’s official website and played in last week’s exhibition game.
Wade challenged national reporter Pat Forde in a fiery exchange on the video call. After Forde asked about Santos and his status with the team, Wade accused the reporter of posing “gotcha” questions.
“We’ll see who gets eligible. We feel good about that group getting eligible,” Wade said. “The ones that were actually on our roster, the ones that are actually on our team, we feel like those guys will get eligible. How about that?”
On Tuesday, judges in the Colorado case that initially gave all players in the 2022 class a fifth year of eligibility before it was reversed via an NCAA challenge seemed to side with the NCAA again during oral arguments. Those judges questioned the argument for an additional year and expressed that a blanket waiver for those fifth-year players could encourage others seeking sixth and seventh years, and even more, to file court cases in the future.
That means the fifth-year players on rosters at LSU and elsewhere might not be able to rely on the federal courts for clearance — they’ll need to successfully win in state courts to play.
Wade cautioned, however, that the recent success of the NCAA doesn’t mean those decisions still stick.
“I just feel good about some of the information we have on the ground on some things,” Wade said about eligibility concerns his team is battling. “I would caution that some things are painted as wins maybe really aren’t wins, and people run with that. I feel good about my information. We’ll see. We’ll see if we’re right.”
