Coach O out at end of season

[Eagle Eye 7 2,535]

21 hours ago, WFE12 said:

People talking about Lane but he should stay at Ole Miss. dude been job hopping for a while. I know LSU is the better job.

Agreed. OM has the boosters to make Lane successful. I think if Lane is smart he stays there. He can get the talent to be a player in the SEC. 

[aubiefifty 16,798]

On 10/17/2021 at 1:19 PM, cctiger said:

Not surprising. Interesting who will be in Red Stick next year though.

my guess is stoops from kaintuck. and with upgraded talent he would be scary good.

[aubiefifty 16,798]

On 10/17/2021 at 2:31 PM, Eagle Eye 7 said:

This is insanity. Especially after beating FL yesterday . The guy is not even two years out from an NC and maybe the best team at LSU ever.  Considering coming off Covid and everything they would have thought differently. He recrudescence well and has a good defense and has lost a lot of coaching talent because they are moving up. It wasn’t like he had lost the team like Chiz or never had the team like Gus. 🤔

i was told by a friend who keeps up with lswho that O lost the team when he would not march with his team supporting political issues and was openly supportive of trump. now please lord i am not trying to start a political discussion. i am just pointing out what started all this before all the skirt chasing. there were some grumblings when it happened but it seems it effected the team worse than most thought? sometimes we are our own worst enemies. i have been most of my own life. and now i know better on most things i am too damn old to do anything about it.

[I_M4_AU 7,848]

2 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

i was told by a friend who keeps up with lswho that O lost the team when he would not march with his team supporting political issues and was openly supportive of trump. now please lord i am not trying to start a political discussion.

This is BS, If you saw LSU lay the wood to Florida, that was NOT a team that Coach O lost.  Look at our loss to Texas A&M in 2012 to see a team that the coach lost.

[WDE_OxPx_2010 5,297]

1 hour ago, I_M4_AU said:

This is BS, If you saw LSU lay the wood to Florida, that was NOT a team that Coach O lost.  Look at our loss to Texas A&M in 2012 to see a team that the coach lost.

Yeah he didn't lose the team. He just wasn't focused enough to be the guy to win 10+ per year and the rest of the conference was getting better. Same reason Gus lost his job, honestly.

[aubiefifty 16,798]

1 hour ago, I_M4_AU said:

This is BS, If you saw LSU lay the wood to Florida, that was NOT a team that Coach O lost.  Look at our loss to Texas A&M in 2012 to see a team that the coach lost.

believe what you want fella everything has not come out yet. the dude had his girlfriends show up at practice. sorry i know and trust my friend more than you because i do not know you. but for the record i believe players complained about him not marching with the team like gus did with us and the turds did with nick. that started the whole thing. here is Si on coach O and what happened. and they say the black lives matter was a significant factor.

com

 

The Swift Fall of Ed Orgeron at LSU: Inside a Stunning Post-Title Collapse

Ross Dellenger

17-21 minutes

---

Last week, during Ed Orgeron’s weekly call-in radio show, a fan buzzed the line asking the coach to wish his younger sister a happy birthday. The caller claimed that the young woman was in attendance at the radio show, held each Wednesday in the fall at a Baton Rouge restaurant. The caller seemed serious and authentic. Orgeron scanned the room for the woman.

And then, abruptly, the man on the line revealed himself as a prankster. Using more blunt words, he told Orgeron not to pursue his sister romantically. Orgeron’s face hardened, and, despite the show’s host attempting to move on quickly, the coach stretched back in his chair, smirked and said, “You know, down the bayou, we got a nice little fishing hole for people like that.”

Two years ago, while LSU marched undefeated to its national championship, Orgeron’s reply might have been brushed off as a humorous retort, a facetious response from a man known for such quips.

Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports

This year, with his team struggling and issues mounting within the program, Orgeron’s comment was received as another public embarrassment for the university—a veiled death threat even—that created more friction between the coach and the school’s frustrated administration.

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Roughly a week after that call-in show, the school and its coach—such a happy marriage that produced the ultimate success—began negotiations to split, days before LSU’s surprising 49–42 win over Florida on Saturday. By the end of the week, the two sides agreed to a settlement, sources tell Sports Illustrated: He will not return in 2022 but will coach the remainder of the ’21 season (LSU announced the news later Sunday).

It is a historic and unprecedented move: a school ushering out a coach with a 74% winning percentage who is a mere 21 months removed from winning a national championship. It is a stunning fall from grace—a bayou-born man who rose from previous failures, claimed the sport’s greatest prize and signed one of the richest contracts in the sport fewer than two years ago.

Orgeron, the second-highest paid coach in the country at more than $8 million a year with a buyout of $17 million, saw his program begin crumbling under the weight of myriad issues. A strained relationship between the coach and administration warped into an untenable situation in Baton Rouge, producing rampant distrust and outbursts.

For example, in the locker room following LSU’s season-opening loss against UCLA at the Rose Bowl and with athletic director Scott Woodward in earshot, Orgeron angrily suggested that school officials could fire him if they wanted, a loud and stirring recognition of his own troublesome job security just one game into the season.

Three people privy to the incident spoke to SI, with one source saying: “He said that to the team: ‘They can fire my ass! I’m a grown man. They can come try to get me!’ ” 

Closed-door eruptions—which included at least one chair-throwing incident—are only part of explaining one of the quickest collapses of a football program in the history of the game, from assembling one of the sport’s greatest teams to spiraling toward the basement of the SEC. How did LSU get here?

More than a dozen people in and around the university spoke to SI, under condition of anonymity, to share stories that help answer that question. They paint a picture of a program that began tilting toward disaster last summer during a mishandling of a player-led social injustice march. Others cite Orgeron’s eccentric behavior, both private and public, that remind many of his tenure as Ole Miss’s coach, which ended in 2007.

The answer for some is much more simple. The foundation of Orgeron’s early-career success in Baton Rouge left him. That includes key assistants, defensive coordinator Dave Aranda and pass-game coordinator Joe Brady, and one of the best quarterbacks to ever play in the college game, Joe Burrow—the three anchors of the 2019, 15–0 national championship squad.

Combine the departures with failed coordinator hires, a rash of significant injuries this year, lingering NCAA and Title IX investigations and a brand-new school president, and LSU finds itself looking for a new leader.

“You get on top and you start to live differently. And that’s when the fall happens,” says one source close to the football program. “Here’s a coach who finally, after decades in the game, achieves the maximum goal. But when you achieve it, it’s ‘My problems are done!’ No. Success sometimes isn’t an end to a problem. It’s the beginning of more.”

---

Orgeron was awarded the American Football Coaches Association Coaches Trophy in January 2020 after leading LSU to a national title.

Stephen Lew/USA TODAY Sports

After taking over as interim for the fired Les Miles four games into the 2016 season, Orgeron led the Tigers to a 6–2 record, excited a fan base with a more high-flying offense and endeared himself to athletic director Joe Alleva and a group of decision-makers with a job pitch. He’d hire strong coordinators, stay out of their way and serve as the face of LSU football—a recruiting whiz and motivational force. When Tom Herman chose to coach Texas and not LSU, Orgeron, originally from about 100 miles south of Baton Rouge, landed his dream job.

Outside of some hiccups in his first year—he sparred with offensive coordinator Matt Canada and the Tigers lost to Troy—LSU steadily improved on the field. Orgeron’s Year 1 finished at 9–4, and he landed Ohio State transfer Burrow during that offseason. A 10–3 season followed in 2018.

And then Orgeron went bold. He plucked a little known, low-level offensive assistant from the New Orleans Saints staff to overhaul LSU’s offense into a pass-heavy spread scheme. The combination of Brady and Burrow plus the defensive mastery of Aranda, along with a plethora of talented receivers and a dozen other NFL-caliber players, created one of the best teams in college football history.

And then everyone left.

Burrow, the 2019 Heisman Trophy winner, was selected with the first pick in the NFL draft. Brady left to be the Carolina Panthers’ offensive coordinator, and Aranda was hired to be Baylor’s head coach. A record-tying 14 LSU players were selected in the draft, five of them in the first round.

Since the completion of that season, LSU has gone 9–8, and the program’s two long-standing pillars—a strong, feisty defense and a lethal rushing attack—have cratered. The 5–5 record last year ended one of the nation’s longest stretches of winning seasons, dating back to 2000.

During the offseason, Woodward expressed his frustration both publicly and privately about the team’s .500 mark. “We don’t do 5–5 at LSU,” he told boosters and alumni. “It’s unacceptable.”

But the losses on the field are a direct result of the off-the-field problems, sources claim. The 5–5 season came only after a turbulent summer in Baton Rouge, where players, as they did at many other programs after a police officer murdered a Black Minneapolis man named George Floyd, staged a march across campus to protest social injustice and support the Black Lives Matter movement. At LSU, it took a different turn.

Two weeks before the march, Orgeron appeared on a Fox News segment where the host asked him repeated questions about the post-championship trip to the White House and his thoughts on then-President Donald Trump. He said he “loved” Trump and that “he’s doing a fantastic job.” Amid the pandemic and in an election year, it was a startling comment for the leader of a largely Black football team during one of the most divisive times in the country’s history.

Word about the television comments reached the team. One former player even weighed in on Twitter. Orgeron is a “great man,” but he is “blind to everything else,” defensive end K’Lavon Chaisson tweeted.

A childhood friend of Orgeron and a longtime LSU booster defends the coach.

“They asked him if Trump treated him good and he said yeah, Trump treated him good,” the man says. “I mean, what are you supposed to say?” The friend acknowledges that “it all went downhill from there.”

A couple of weeks later, LSU players staged their march. A former player’s parent described the march as more of a player “revolt” as anger within the team swelled over the coach’s comments and inaction. JaCoby Stevens, then a senior safety, told players inside the locker room that they would not play football for Orgeron until “we get this fixed,” a source recalls.

Without their coach, the players then marched to the school president’s office, where Orgeron later arrived, emerging from a Black SUV with Woodward and then holding a team meeting at the site. Despite the glowing public portrayal of the meeting, those who attended describe it differently. One source says it was Woodward’s first piece of real “evidence” that “the job is too big for [Orgeron].”

Nearly every person who spoke to SI described that day—Aug. 28, 2020—as the date in which the coach “lost” his football team. “They really f----- up all the social justice stuff last year,” says one former player. “There’s no getting the team back after that.”

“The players believed in their heart that this president [Trump] is causing harm to them and their culture,” says another source. “Whether you believe it or not, you can’t go on there.”

---

With Burrow (left) at quarterback, LSU's potent spread offense routinely destroyed defenses en route to the 2019 championship.

Brett Davis/USA TODAY Sports

The hiring of Bo Pelini in January 2020 was supposed to return LSU to what Orgeron wanted—a four-man defensive front as opposed to the 3–4 unit that Aranda operated. In Baton Rouge, Pelini’s hire was heralded by many who recall his days of leading LSU to the ’07 national title as the coordinator for Miles. The hire came with a steep price tag—a guaranteed three-year $7 million deal.

Ultimately, the decision resulted in an unmitigated disaster. Orgeron and Pelini rarely talked, those who worked around them say. Pelini refused to follow orders, even missing meetings or arriving late. On the field, LSU gave up 429 yards a game, better than only three other FBS teams in 2020. From a statistical standpoint, it was the worst defensive year in LSU football history. And the Tigers cut Pelini a $4 million check to go away—the third such costly early exit of a coordinator under Orgeron. Among Pelini, Canada and 2020 pass game coordinator Scott Linehan, the program paid nearly $7 million in buyout money to fire them after their first seasons.

“O is an amazing recruiter and motivator, but he failed at a head coach’s most important job: recruiting the finest coordinators and assistant coaches possible,” says one person who helped hire Orgeron as LSU’s full time coach. “We utterly failed at that.”

In 2021, Orgeron sought to return LSU to the offensive philosophy that Brady and Burrow executed in ’19. So he hired Jake Peetz, a 38-year-old Carolina Panthers assistant who had studied the system in one season with Brady in the NFL. Peetz had never been a coordinator.

The effort to rebrand Brady’s offense has failed. LSU ranks 72nd in total offense, and the struggles have resulted in private eruptions from the coach targeted at his offensive coordinator. One source describes the hiring of Peetz as “chasing the ghost of Joe Brady.” Without Burrow and his legion of receivers, the success hasn’t arrived. “It’s like they put Dale Earnhardt behind the wheel of a Corolla and were like, ‘Come on, make it go fast!’ ” says one person who used to work on staff.

Defensively, Pelini’s replacement, Daronte Jones, another first-time coordinator, has dealt with a rash of injuries. In fact, LSU played Florida without five defensive starters, including three who are out of the season and another who has been deemed the nation’s best cornerback, Derek Stingley Jr.

The team is also without its best offensive player, receiver Kayshon Boutte, and highly touted running back John Emery, who is academically ineligible. Quarterback Myles Brennan, a fifth-year player groomed to take over last year for Burrow, suffered a season-ending injury midway through last season and then reinjured himself while fishing in July days before preseason camp.

While injuries bugged LSU this year, roster-management problems, exacerbated by COVID-19 issues, resulted in a lack of depth last year. In the final 2020 regular-season game, against Florida, the Tigers were down to 54 scholarship players, more than 30 below the NCAA-allowed 85.

How did it get to such a point?

There was the wave of departures from the 2019 team, including nine players who left early for the NFL draft, and then five transfers during the ’20 offseason, including elite linebacker Marcel Brooks. Seven players opted out of last season, including receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Terrace Marshall Jr. and tight end Arik Gilbert. Three more players transferred during the fall.

Some attribute the exodus to a culture within the program stemming from the summer of 2020. Others point to Orgeron’s ramp-up of physically grinding practices, something he had reversed after taking over for Miles. Lastly, sources point to the team’s strict drug-testing policy, which resulted in the dismissal of the team’s best offensive lineman, Dare Rosenthal, now a starter at Kentucky.

“Two things make players quit,” says one source, “all the hitting and the drug-testing.”

---

The Tigers went just 5–5 in a COVID-19-impacted 2020 season, ending a long run of winning seasons by the program.

Christopher Hanewinckel/USA TODAY Sports

While walking into the Rose Bowl in September, Orgeron glanced above him at a heckling UCLA fan.

Television cameras caught the coach playfully calling the fan a “sissy” and proposing the fan enter the stadium to find himself a fight. “Bring your ass on [in here] in your little sissy blue shirt,” Orgeron said.

The video went viral. It spread so quickly that after UCLA beat the Tigers, 38–27, the Bruins poked at the coach by selling T-shirts monogrammed with the words “Sissy Blue.”

It was a fitting response, as Orgeron’s team was the one knocked around on the field, stunningly unable to stop the run or run the football against a Pac-12 team that, now, has lost two games. The Tigers’ offensive line struggled mightily, of which some attribute to the school’s firing of line coach James Cregg in June. Already under investigation by the NCAA for an assortment of violations, the school split with Cregg over his providing improper benefits to a recruit during the NCAA dead period, sources tell SI.

“The offensive line basically had a midseason coaching change,” one person describes it. “They’ve got to get used to you, get used to the new guy.”

The trip to Los Angeles, while exposing the line issues, provided more reason for school officials to think that their coach wasn’t fit to lead, given both the postgame locker room outbursts, his “sissy blue” comment and the team’s overall performance. Nationally, LSU was branded as soft and lacking effort.

Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN’s lead college football analyst, derided the program on national television. Before one game, he questioned whether the team “cares about playing football anymore.” Ahead of another game, he quipped, “LSU does not play hard. That’s the new LSU.”

Meanwhile, within LSU’s football operations building, the atmosphere has been described by three people as extraordinarily “volatile” and “hellish.” Orgeron has grown distant from many staff members and eruptions are commonplace. One Friday night in the team hotel, before the loss at Kentucky, multiple sources describe an incident in which the coach threw a chair and blasted some support-staff members for an issue over the team’s hype video.

“He’s felt the pressure,” says one source. “It’s the pressure. ‘We gotta win.’ ”

Some believe Orgeron feels betrayed. He got divorced a month after the team won the national title, and his dating life has become fodder for fans, with even a photo surfacing in the middle of last season of him and a woman in bed together.

Plus, the two people to which he answers, Woodward and school president William Tate IV, did not hire him. Woodward, like Orgeron a Louisiana native, arrived in the spring of 2019. Tate, hired from South Carolina, arrived this past summer.

Tate has a history of being an influential voice in athletics and, early on, has been involved in the situation around Orgeron, sources tell SI. In fact, the president and Woodward met Saturday after the win over Florida near the Tigers’ locker room, while LSU players and coaches celebrated a stunning victory as near two-touchdown underdogs.

It was an awkward postgame atmosphere, made even more unique when Orgeron earlier had brushed off congratulatory messages from the new president and high-level administrators—a clear sign that the two sides had hashed out this deal days ago.

Orgeron’s LSU legacy, in many ways, will be similar to that of his predecessor. Miles, like Orgeron, claimed a championship, but the Tigers’ fan base never seemed to embrace a stubborn man with an old-fashioned offense. “Some fans say that every good thing that ever happened, O had nothing to do with, but every bad thing is on him,” says one source. “I don’t agree with that.”

Now, attention turns to a coaching search that is expected to include those at the top of college football. The LSU job is one of the country’s most attractive. It is the only flagship college institution in the state, is dropped in a fertile recruiting area and has bountiful resources and flashy facilities.

In fact, the school’s last three coaches have each won a national title, a run that began with Nick Saban’s awakening this sleeping giant. And now, here it is, roaring onward.

“No coach is bigger than the brand at LSU,” says one source. “That’s what Scott Woodward can’t let happen.”

 

[I_M4_AU 7,848]

45 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

Nearly every person who spoke to SI described that day—Aug. 28, 2020—as the date in which the coach “lost” his football team. “They really f----- up all the social justice stuff last year,” says one former player. “There’s no getting the team back after that.”

This is what you’re hanging your hat on?  August of last year?  Again, the fact that Coach O rallied the team to beat Florida belies the statement from the former player.

There is enough in that article that Coach O did to himself to torpedo the team in the eyes of the AD for the AD to take action.  It actually reminds me of Chizik and Tubs with regard to bad coordinator hires.  The personality stuff is just fodder.

[aubiefifty 16,798]

1 minute ago, I_M4_AU said:

This is what you’re hanging your hat on?  August of last year?  Again, the fact that Coach O rallied the team to beat Florida belies the statement from the former player.

There is enough in that article that Coach O did to himself to torpedo the team in the eyes of the AD for the AD to take action.  It actually reminds me of Chizik and Tubs with regard to bad coordinator hires.  The personality stuff is just fodder.

i am not going to argue with you all day. with the bs comment i assume that is what you are looking for. O did have problems with the team and maybe he got that fixed but it did happen. and like i said there is a ton of stuff still to come out. keep watching.

[keesler 5,924]

8 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

This is what you’re hanging your hat on?  August of last year?  Again, the fact that Coach O rallied the team to beat Florida belies the statement from the former player.

There is enough in that article that Coach O did to himself to torpedo the team in the eyes of the AD for the AD to take action.  It actually reminds me of Chizik and Tubs with regard to bad coordinator hires.  The personality stuff is just fodder.

The crapshow of Steve Ensminger as OC & Bo Pelini DC in 2020 + him doubling down on stupidity by hiring an OC & DC this year who've never been coordinators in their entire career is enough to sink the man.  

If he were winning 10 games a year he'd be fine, but he's not so he's gone. 

[j0hnnyRingo 1,445]

Reading that article... I had no clue Coach O is the 2nd highest paid College Football Coach in the country.  That's nuts.

[keesler 5,924]

36 minutes ago, j0hnnyRingo said:

Reading that article... I had no clue Coach O is the 2nd highest paid College Football Coach in the country.  That's nuts.

LSU got him at a discount for the first few years, then BAM he went 15-0 and brought home the hardware so up goes the pay rate.  The man has the goods on LSU and could sink them with the Title IX & the sexual abuse lawsuits.  So they wisely paid him $21mm buyout and have him go quietly. 

Edited October 20, 2021 by keesler

[cctiger 571]

6 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

my guess is stoops from kaintuck. and with upgraded talent he would be scary good.

I think that they go for, and get a bigger fish than Stoops. 

[aubiefifty 16,798]

47 minutes ago, cctiger said:

I think that they go for, and get a bigger fish than Stoops. 

it could be. i just think with the job stoops has done with the talent he has is really good.

[Gowebb11 9,326]

Ed O has been a train wreck from a character standpoint his whole career. If he was 7-0 right now LSU still wouldn’t care about that. But at 4-3 suddenly it’s an issue they care deeply about it. He should’ve been out of coaching a long time ago.

Edited October 20, 2021 by Gowebb11

[gravejd 3,270]

On 10/20/2021 at 3:30 PM, aubiefifty said:

it could be. i just think with the job stoops has done with the talent he has is really good.

I agree on Stoops being a really good coach. To build the Kentucky program into an east contender is very impressive. I also think LSU is looking for something more than a really good coach. I predict they will be out hunting for the next Saban and i feel pretty confident Stoops does not have that high of a ceiling. The UF and Dan Mullen experiment has slowed me down a bit on over hyping coaches that over perform at traditionally not great schools. Mullen took State to levels never seen at that school but he hasn't been able to do the same at UF. I'm not sure why that is....if some dudes just have a ceiling or if that just goes to show how hard it is to be a really great team. Mullen also may have just hit the jackpot in Dak and road him to greatness. 

Plus Stoops was looking very shaky at Kentucky last season with that god awful offense. They fixed it this season but shows he relies heavily on having a good OC.

[aubiefifty 16,798]

3 minutes ago, gravejd said:

I agree on Stoops being a really good coach. To build the Kentucky program into an east contender is very impressive. I also think LSU is looking for something more than a really good coach. I predict they will be out hunting for the next Saban and i feel pretty confident Stoops does not have that high of a ceiling. The UF and Dan Mullen experiment has slowed me down a bit on over hyping coaches that over perform at traditionally not great schools. Mullen took State to levels never seen at that school but he hasn't been able to do the same at UF. I'm not sure why that is....if some dudes just have a ceiling or if that just goes to show how hard it is to be a really great team. Mullen also may have just hit the jackpot in Dak and road him to greatness. 

Plus Stoops was looking very shaky at Kentucky last season with that god awful offense. They fixed it this season but shows he relies heavily on having a good OC.

i agree. i cannot stand mullins after the cam thing but if he had a great D guy his record is probably better. but then again i read he would have never started trask if others had not been hurt. he sure is quick to blame his current d guy but he did it last year as well and still kept him. i hope he loses his job. i would not buy a pencil from him if he was sitting on a street corner with horrible injuries selling them. he smeared auburn and made us look bad nationally with him and his wife's lies. i was raised better but auburn is more than special to me. i say screw him and let him eat fish heads. no offense to fish heads of course.........lol

[bootskii 264]

https://247sports.com/college/penn-state/Article/Penn-State-football-coach-James-Franklin-changes-agent-to-Jimmy-Sexton-per-report-173897928/

My money is it's going to be Franklin. Franklin just hired an SEC AD's kryptonite in Jimmy Sexton. Sexton currently represents 11 of the 14 head coaches in the SEC. Either he is going to LSU or he is setting PSU up for a biiiiiig pay raise.

[augolf1716 21,170]

1 hour ago, bootskii said:

Either he is going to LSU or he is setting PSU up for a biiiiiig pay raise.

Completely agree