re: Who has been LSU's best AD?

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Brodhead hired Saban and John Brady(I think).

Skip hired Les and Paul Manieri.

Just going by those, I'd give a slight edge to Brodhead.

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Joe Dean hired them NS and PM...Brodhead died in 1996

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Joe Dean hired them NS and PM

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naw......he sure didn't

Jim Corbett
Description from Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame

Sport: Football

Induction Year: 1985

When a Louisiana State University football team that suffered three regular season losses snapped the Arkansas Razorbacks' 22-game winning streak in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, 1966, the picture of athletic director Jim Corbett and head coach Charlie McClendon embracing at the end of the game epitomized the thrill of victory in college athletics.

It was the boundless enthusiasm and promotional genius of Corbett, as much as the coaching Paul Dietzel and McClendon, that carried LSU to the top level of college football in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

His father died when Corbett was four months old, and the boy was sent to live with grandparents. The promotional skills that served him so well in Louisiana surfaced when he was entering high school. He wanted to go to a private school, and raised the $300 it required by convincing three men to pay an extra $100 for their sons' tuitions.

Corbett hitch-hiked from Massachusetts to Louisiana in the fall of 1940, answering a newspaper advertisement for football players at Southeastern Louisiana College . He paid for the trip along the way by working in a bottling plant and as a trucker's helper. When he arrived on the SLC campus in Hammond , he earned a football scholarship.

A knee injury one year later ended his playing career, but Corbett convinced Southeastern officials to keep him on scholarship as the school's first sports publicity director.

Corbett, who had been a part-time stringer for a Boston newspaper while he was attending high school, got a job with the Associated Press bureau in New Orleans following his graduation in 1944. Then he persuaded his boss to transfer him to Baton Rouge . In August of 1945, he became sports publicity director at LSU.

In 1953, Corbett joined NBC as coordinator for its college football series. A year later, he applied for the athletic directory vacancy at LSU—leaving a job that paid $14,000 a year for one that paid $10,000—“because I've always wanted to be an athletic director.”

The previous year, average home attendance at LSU home football games was 27,800. With Corbett as athletic director and Dietzel as head coach, a 1955 team that won only three games played before crowds averaging 47,894—including 6,243 season tickets sold. In Corbett's 13 years as athletic director, season tickets would climb past 35,000 and the average hom attendance for each of the last seven seasons was over 62,000.

Corbett and Dietzel went all over the state promoting LSU. “We sold a product we believed in,” said Corbett. “We'd drive as much as 200 miles to speak to as few a 10 persons.”

Corbett's contacts with network TV and his rapport with the press gave LSU a favorable image both nationally and regionally. With his public relations approach to running an athletic department, he made LSU a household word throughout the nation. “He probably initiated the trend of selling a university that was never tried or thought of before,” said long-time Baton rouge Morning Advocate sports editor Bud Montet.

“Jim was one of the pioneers for restricted TV for football games in the 1950s. He didn't want to oversaturate the market—which is what has occurred today.”

“Jim was a pioneer with television in college football,” recalled McClendon. “And he had the ability to expedite things in five minutes.”

Corbett envisioned the “spirit of Tiger Stadium” as a unique blend of people. “What we have is the Great Society of Equality at work,” he said. “They all band together in a single social stratum. In Baton Rouge , the focal point of everything is LSU football. The average fan doesn't seem to have a good week in his job if the Tigers lose.”

He chose McClendon to succeed Dietzel, and came to his coach's defense when the Tigers suffer through a 5-4-1 season in 1966. “I feel partly responsible because I made the schedule,” Corbett said. He asked critics to compare McClendon's record for his first five years to those of “Bear” Bryant, Frank Broyles, Darrell Royal and Ara Parseghian. (The obvious deference was that McClendon inherited a national powerhouse, while the others took over struggling programs.)

He had the same name as the man who won the first world heavyweight boxing title decided by Marquis of Queensberry rules by knocking out John L. Sullivan in 1982, and often referred to the boxing champion in introducing himself.

Corbett was a fighter in different arenas. He had few peers in recruiting battles, and he was constantly fighting to keep the LSU football program headed in the right direction. His name was mentioned for a front office job when the New Orleans Saints were being formed but Corbett said, “I'm a college man and I always will be.”

Carl Maddox, who succeeded Corbett a year after his death, said it was a tough act to follow.

“All of us in the athletic department basked in the limelight that shown on Jim,” Maddox said. “He had changed the image of athletic directors. He had shifted LSU's image to the national scene. And his personality could not be emulated.”

“Jim had great enthusiasm for whatever he was doing. He was a very stimulating person to be around.”

Corbett was a fighter to the end. Two days before his death, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Southeastern Conference to remove its limit of 140 scholarships. But he went out a winner, celebrating the signing of blue-chip quarterback Butch Duhe at a New Orleans restaurant.

Planning to attend a meeting in New York the next day, he spent the night at a New Orleans motel. The following morning, he called the desk clerk, told him he was ill and asked him to call Dr. Abe Mickal, one of LSU's football greats who later became a very successful physician. When Dr. Mickal arrived at the motel, Corbett was dead of a heart attack at the age of 47

I agrre with Northshore Tiger, Brodhead got us headed in the right direction.

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Broadhead hired the best coaches: Skip Bertman, Sue Gunter, Pat Henry and Bill Arnsparger. That's a ton on NCs with Bertman and Henry and a ton of wins with Gunter. Bertman and Gunter built successful programs where there was nothing.

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My recollection of Broadhead - I was a young at the time - was that he was a great AD. The issue was he was probably ahead of his time as a visionary and butted heads a lot with the establishment.

Joe Dean wasn't a terrible AD, he just didn't see the potential. He was fine running a program in the black. That meant he hired on the cheap to keep the budget low, never realizing that if he spent money he could make even more money.

Joe Dean is credited with the Saban hire, but it was really all Emmert. Emmert saw what Dean didn't. Potential and branding. He was the de facto AD when we hired Saban and the facility improvements.

Skip was a penny pincher too, but because of his notoriety, he raised tons of dollars for the program that helped the Emmert/Saban idea of spend money to make money. Because of that, Skip was a solid AD. But Emmert left and Saban was a jackass butting heads with everyone, including Skip. I think he was happy to see Saban go.

As far as Alleva, I don't know. He hasn't done anything to impress me.

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Brodhead

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One of Broahhead's biggest problems was his battles with Dale Brown, who was in his glory yrs at the time & ruled the athletic dept. But he took his business background &, to me, laid the first building blocks for the turn around of LSU athletics. Skip had a lot of distractors as AD, his penny pinching ways rubbed a lot of people the wrong way & if he was not Skip Bertman, HOF baseball coach, he would not have been as near effective as he ended up being. Dean was a puppet & had no real say in the big picture running of the Athletic Dept. Broadhead gets my vote by a landslide.

who was the editor of Tiger Rag during Bob's tenure as AD back in the day? I forget, but there were some epic piss screaming editorials.

good stuff.

Brodhead was indeed way ahead of his time.

My two cents:

Joe dean gets crap for the Curley hire, but at the time, Curley was the hottest coach on the market. It was a no brainer. F'ck Brett Favre.

Dinardo brought back the magic...

Dean found and hired Nick Saban. Saban did want more money than Dean wanted to give him so Emmert gets the credit for finally getting him by approving Sabans counter offer on his hiring. But Dean found him and hired him.

Dean hired John Brady, he wasn't great but he did bring us to the Final Four (yeah i know, collis temple recruits)... Joe Alleva hired Trent Johnson so.....

And yes, Dean gets shite for not spending money, but he didn't have the money. I get the spend money to make money thing, but at the time, college programs weren't doing what they are doing now, it wasn't just us.

Dean also hired Pat Henry, one of the best track coaches of all time, and then skip let him walk like an idiot.

Also, when Saban left, he asked skip to pony up more money to keep him and Skip didn't. Saban could've been using it for leverage but we could still have saban now.... Just saying.

Over the past 50+ years that I have followed LSU sports, all of the ADs have brought different things to the table.
That said, what Bob Broadhead had was an "out of the box' thought process since he was not previously an AD. I think he came from the Dolphins front office. This was both a help and a hinderance. He was known as "Bottomline Bob" because the athletic department was in a financial mess...remember the Purple and Gold fur coats ? He turned things around financially. He also brought in Arnsbarger as coach, who, had he stayed, would have brought LSU to the top of college football in the late 80s and early 90s.
All this said, it's hard to say who has been the best. I do think that of all the ADs in the last 50 years, Paul Deitzel was the worst !