PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The transparency king of college basketball was rewarded for his candidness on Thursday.
Because what’s happening with Will Wade and McNeese is basically unprecedented in these ever-paranoid times in the sport.

Every March, there are hot-name coaches who guide their teams to this tournament. Privately, as this is happening, they and their agents talk to other schools about the prospect of taking another job. It’s quite literally what’s transpiring elsewhere with a number of vacancies right now.

Normally, everyone keeps it hush-hush — or at least tries to until the jig is forced to be up.

With Wade, there is no jig. He is jig-less. The most publicly honest coach in the sport has not run nor hid from a would-be awkward situation. Instead, he’s leaned into the blunt truth (what a concept!) and it’s helped his McNeese Cowboys make history in the process. Wade is in line to be the next coach at NC State.

Going into Thursday’s game against fifth-seeded Clemson, plenty thought that a supposedly distracted McNeese team might get pushed out by a 27-6 Tigers team that won more games this season than any previous one in its history.

Nope.

McNeese refused to have its season end Thursday. Wade’s 12th-seeded Cowboys upset Clemson 69-67 to improve to 28-6 and advance to Saturday’s second round, where No. 4 Purdue awaits. It’s the school’s first NCAA Tournament win ever and it’s the Southland Conference’s first NCAA conquest of an ACC opponent — ever.

“We’re not worried about any of that stuff,” Wade said outside the team’s locker room, re: NC State. “I mean, here’s the thing: We can sit here and lie about it, but it is what it is. Our guys aren’t worried about it, I ain’t worried about it, none of our administration’s worried about it, nobody’s worried about it. We’ve been honest with everybody. It’s great! Keep winning! Keep going!”

This is the payoff. With Wade, what you see is what you get. He is so frank, it is jarring. There is no filter on that 42-year-old mouth. There is no one like this guy in college basketball.

“You may not like what I’ve got to say but I’m going to tell you what I think,” Wade said. “Our guys know that. That’s what (Qadir) Copeland was laughing about in the press conference. Sometimes he tells me, ‘My man, can you sugarcoat the truth a little bit? Like, it’s just too direct.’”

You know what else was direct? The way McNeese punked Clemson. The Tigers were overwhelmed. They saved face with a desperate second half push that got the final margin to two, but Brad Brownell’s team was effectively finished in the first 20 minutes. The Cowboys clobbered the Tigers 31-13 by halftime, marking the second-fewest points in the first half of an NCAA Tournament game ever by an ACC program. (Wake Forest: 10, in 2001.)

Wade pulled out a surprise: He deployed a 2-3 zone defense for the first time this season. Clemson was shook. It got down by as many as 24 in the second half and didn’t have enough time to pull off the comeback.

“We’ve been saving that zone all year,” Wade said.

McNeese, in this tournament for a second straight season and now with 58 wins over the past two years, was champing at the bit to be the bracket-busting Cowboys out of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

“It don’t got nothing to do with Clemson,” Copeland said. “We could have beat any team in here. It’s just amazing to win with these guys.”

His players are just as honest as he is. Clemson just happened to be the victim; it could’ve been nearly anyone.

For now: jubilance.

Once the game went final, Wade was as joyful and celebratory as any coach we’ll see Thursday or Friday. You can be a cynic and think he’s just headhunting for a bigger gig, or you can watch this and see a man reacting in real time to what he considers the most rewarding moment of his jagged career.

This is Will Wade’s world. When news broke Wednesday about his impending hiring at NC State, Wade’s players weren’t caught off-guard. They were practicing at Brown University’s Pizzitola Center. When everybody went to check their phones after practice they came back to hundreds — thousands, maybe — of collective texts.