Photo courtesy of McNeese Athletics

By Wyatt Junkmann

The Bayou Bandits take on No. 5-seed Vanderbilt at 2:15 today in Oklahoma City in the First Round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

Amid the record-breaking season and the hype leading up to this point, what has this season thrown at the Bandits?

This season starts with last year’s upset win over Clemson in the First Round of March Madness. Coach Will Wade left McNeese to go to NC State, so in stepped Bill Armstrong, a former LSU assistant under Wade, coach of NBA first round pick Ja’Kobe Walker, and a first-time NCAA head coach.

Armstrong got straight to work and led the 2025-2026 McNeese team to a 28-5 overall record. But this season was not all flowers, as leading scorer and 2024-2025 Southland Player of the Year Javohn Garcia was out for a critical month of the season. Armstrong and his staff kept a cool head and went 7-0 without Garcia.

Garcia returned for the SLC Conference Tournament, where he started off slow against UT Rio Grande Valley, not able to make the same impact fans have gotten used to. But after a triple overtime victory sent McNeese to the Southland Conference Championship, Garcia returned to being a leading scorer, dropping 31 points en route to a third-straight Southland Conference Tournament Victory.

Alongside Garcia and Armstrong, the Southland’s Freshman of the Year, Larry Johnson, and junior Tyshawn Archie helped the team find its dangerous offense. On the defensive side of the ball, senior Jerrell Colbert lead the team in offensive rebounds, with at least one block per game, and was top three in the team in total rebounds.

Senior guard DJ Richards Jr. said the Bayou Bandits’ historic seasons have created new expectations for the team.

“When you reach new goals, there’s new expectations,” Richards said at a Wednesday press conference. “We came up here knowing what we had to do no matter who we were against. I feel like we have the right players, the right coaching staff, and the right support that always pushes us to be the people that we can be and that we want to be. We just put our faith in God, tie our shoes like everybody else and try to make it happen.”

Armstrong said the team expects to win, and he and his staff work from that perspective.

“When we got here that was the standard,” Armstrong said. “We knew that was the expectation, and that’s what we started working towards since Day 1. To see that come full circle almost a year since I was hired is a pretty cool thing to see. Just to do it for Lake Charles. We have such support back there, just to be able to give them the opportunity to come back to the NCAA Tournament.”

One game, the season on the line, with chaos known to happen anytime in March Madness. Tune in on TruTV this afternoon at 2:15 to catch the McNeese Bayou Bandits against the Vanderbilt Commodores for the chance to keep dancing in the NCAA Tournament.