Out of morbid curiosity, I went to the LSU website, maneuvered into the basketball section, and clicked on “Roster.”

Nothing came up.

Blank.

Nada.

Big fat list of nothing.

And this was not your normal technical difficulties. The Wi-Fi was functional. The internet was working fine.

So I waited an hour and tried again.

Ah-hah. OK. It had been updated.

This time there was a message reading: “The Roster Of Players For the Selected Season Is Not Available At This Time.”

Truth be told, the roster is not available because there is not one.

At this moment, LSU doesn’t really have a basketball team.

No players, at least.

The cupboard is bare.

Strange. They seemed to have had a full complement just a couple of weeks or so ago in the NCAA Tournament.

They didn’t have a head coach then — the www.coach, Will “Wiretap” Wade, had already been fired.

So now the Tigers have a head coach in Matt McMahon, promising choice, too.

But for the first time since 1907 — when the game was still evolving from chunking soccer balls at peach baskets — LSU has no basketball players.

McMahon said at his introductory news conference that he was aware of what he was getting into.

But it’s tough to win with no players. And I don’t mean no “PLAY-uhs,” as in really good players. No, we’re talking about no players at all, of any size, shape or form.

The entire scholarship roster from just over two weeks ago has vanished into thin air.

That’s not an exodus, it’s a mad-cap stampede — but 11 Tigers have entered the NCAA transfer portal, two others are entering the NBA draft early.

That accounts for everybody.

Wade had four highly touted players committed to enter the program for next season — and all four have, as they say on social media, “reopened my recruitment.”

Translation: Forget it. See ya later.

So right now McMahon is a promising coach with no players to coach — probably not what he signed up for.

There ought to be a “Help Wanted” sign attached to the Maravich Assemby Center.

McMahon said when taking the job that his first order of business would be steady meetings with current players, talking up his vision for he program.

Apparently, he was talking mostly to himself.

It’s not a total shocker, of course. Surely, it’s not McMahon’s fault. It’s all in response to what got Wade canned — the school receiving the NCAA Notice of Allegations which detailed seven Level I allegations against the program under Wade.

LSU still has to respond to them and then the NCAA will release its sanctions.

So it’s still a ticking time bomb.

But the response by the players who were there tells you everybody is assuming the worst, if not a hoops apocalypse.

It’s hard to blame those leaving or backing out.

Figure on multiple years banned from the NCAA Tournament, probably a reduction in scholarships, that nobody apparently wants due to the presumed postseason ban.

McMahon will find some, maybe enough to round up a starting five. He’s already got two transfers following him from Murray State, which went 31-3 and reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament this year, and also picked up a stray from Northwestern State.

But you’ve got to really, really want to be a Tiger to sign up for a hitch with this cloud hanging out there.

For now … remember LSU and Kansas State in the Texas Bowl, when various factors — the portal, concentrating on the NFL draft, an academic casualty or two, a few injuries and COVID precautions — forced the Tigers to send a glorified JV team to Houston without — among many other things — a quarterback.

That was admirable only for the honest effort by an outmanned team against impossible odds.

It was easier to swallow because it was a one-shot aberration.

LSU basketball, assuming McMahon can gather enough players, could be looking at a couple of seasons worth of similar mismatched frustration.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com