Nick Saban captured his first career national title while coaching LSU in 2003. His successor, Les Miles, did the same four years later. After Miles’s lengthy run with the Tigers, his former assistant and interim-turned-full-time coach Ed Orgeron fielded perhaps the greatest team in school history and bulldozed college football en route to the 2019 championship. After Orgeron’s tenure burned out, the program tabbed former Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, who failed to do what his three predecessors did at LSU, despite the school’s significant resources.
Kelly was fired Sunday, after a blowout loss to his former assistant Mike Elko and Texas A&M, leaving the program on the hook for his $53-plus million buyout (before offsets from any new job that Kelly lands; Kelly has a duty to mitigate clause in his deal requiring him to seek new employment).
The move had ripple effects within the school. In a fiery Wednesday press conference that was supposed to be about SNAP benefits in Louisiana amid the federal government shutdown, governor Jeff Landry stated that athletic director Scott Woodward would not be the one making the next hire, and that it would be up to a committee formed by the school’s board of supervisors—an announcement that was news to the board’s chair hours later.
By Thursday, Woodward himself was out of a job—an unsurprising development given how he was so publicly defenestrated by the state’s governor, with no school president in place to give him cover. Interim athletic director Verge Ausberry held a press conference Friday morning outlining next steps for the school, and while he is just one member of the committee that will make the hire, he made one thing clear: LSU expects to compete for the national title every single year.
"We are going to hire the best football coach there is,” he said, per Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger. We are not going to let this program fail. LSU has to be in the playoff every year in football."
Ausberry said that Louisiana State “is not broken,” despite the school’s appearance this week, and that it will do “whatever it takes” to hire the best coach for the Tigers.
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Of course, in modern college football, “whatever it takes” means millions and millions of dollars, and a contract that may fly in the face of logic, as we’ve seen from both the buyouts of coaches like Kelly and Penn State’s James Franklin, and the recent megadeal handed to Indiana’s Curt Cignetti.
That flies in the face of what Landry said just two days ago, when he railed against Creative Artists Agency and agent to the football stars Jimmy Sexton, who represents many of the top coaches in college football.
"We are not going down a failed path, and I want to tell you something, this is a pattern," Landry said. "The guy that's here now that wrote that contract [Woodward] cost Texas A&M $77 million. Right now, we've got a $53 million liability. We're not doing that again. ... I'm not gonna be picking the next coach, but I can promise you we're gonna pick a coach and we're gonna make sure that coach is successful, and we're gonna make sure that he's compensated properly. And we are going to put metrics on it, because I'm tired of rewarding failure in this country and then leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill.”
LSU is probably the best open job in college football, on paper, even in what is shaping up to be a historic coaching carousel. Landry’s comments are logical, but if LSU wants to contend at the top of the market and hire the coach that it believes has the best chance of repeating what Saban, Miles and Orgeron achieved during their tenures, logic may have to go out the window once the coffers open.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as LSU's Interim AD Lays Out Ambitious Expectations for Next Football Coach.