The Hayride: Hopefully, This Week We Can Calm The LSU Meltards Down A Bit

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There has been a stampede of meltards taking to social media and, well, melting down, among LSU fans since Scott Woodward’s firing as the athletic director last week, and while some of that is probably political in nature, a lot more of it is people letting their emotional freak flag fly.

And that isn’t a great look.

What you keep hearing is that Louisiana’s governor Jeff Landry is turning himself into Huey Long, who used to act the arse around the LSU football team when he was essentially the dictator in charge of the state in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Why? Because Landry popped off at a press conference called to announce the state was bailing out the SNAP program over the short term until, it’s expected, the Democrats give up their filibuster and end the federal government shutdown. Landry got asked about Brian Kelly’s firing as the football coach and who would run the search to replace him, and he more or less gave Woodward a public evisceration over Kelly’s contract, and while saying he wasn’t going to hire the next football coach Landry voiced his preference for performance-based contracts instead of the long-term guaranteed deals Woodward had been throwing around.

Woodward was gone a day or two later and from there, Landry was then branded as a meddler in the LSU athletic program. Some of the meltards even claimed that because he’d gone to ULL for college and Loyola University for law school, Landry hates LSU and is trying to destroy the school.

Which might be a little much, don’t you think?

He’s in a suite for pretty much all of the LSU football games and a lot of the baseball games. If you’ve spent any time with Landry socially you’ll know he’s a good example of what used to be known as “subway alumni” – people with no connection to a school but became fans reading about its exploits in the sports page while riding the subway to and from work. It’s pretty rare to grow up in Louisiana and not be an LSU fan, especially if you then get into politics in the state.

But supposedly, because Woodward aligns politically with John Bel Edwards, James Carville and the rest of what’s left of a white Democrat establishment in the state, Landry fired him because of politics.

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I’ve noted this on social media, and I’m honestly perplexed that the meltards don’t understand it, but Scott Woodward is going to end up being responsible for more than EIGHTY MILLION DOLLARS in contract buyout liabilities during his time at LSU.

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Kelly obviously wasn’t vetted before Woodward gave him a 10-year, $95 million contract that was 90 percent guaranteed. It turns out he was a burnout case at Notre Dame, had already built a retirement home and was telling people he was only going to coach a couple more years and he was done. Given that, it’s utter malpractice to have given Kelly that contract.

Orgeron’s extension was also a headscratcher. That 2019 season was a miracle and he deserved credit for engineering it, but nobody was trying to hire Ed Orgeron away from LSU. Woodward could have given him a big bonus for winning that title and Orgeron would have been happy; instead, he loaded him up with an extension at a time when Orgeron’s marriage had collapsed and he was enjoying his newly-found freedom a whole lot more than decorum would indicate. It was eminently foreseeable that he was not going to handle success in a sustainable way, but Woodward put LSU on the hook for more money than Ed Orgeron could ever have imagined he’d make.

Why would you think Scott Woodward would escape the consequences of these stupid decisions?

Because he hired Kim Mulkey and Jay Johnson?

Mulkey and Johnson are terrific. Congrats to Woodward that he got them to LSU. But let’s not pretend these were examples of brilliant athletic directorship.

Getting Kim Mulkey wasn’t all that hard to do. Mulkey is Louisiana through and through, and she spent four years in the stands at Alex Box Stadium watching her son Kramer Robertson play for the baseball team. All it took to get her to come home from Baylor was paying the price she wanted.

Joe Alleva, who hasn’t fared particularly well in these pages when we’ve discussed his time as LSU’s AD, had opportunities to hire Mulkey. He ran the numbers and couldn’t make them work, because women’s basketball doesn’t make money. Paying $2.5 million or more for a coach in that sport is going to drown that program in red ink, and Alleva didn’t think it was justified.

Mulkey’s now making $3.5 million. Women’s basketball loses $8.5 million a year at LSU, which if I’m not mistaken is the worst figure in all of the NCAA. And yes, LSU did get a national championship out of all of this, and that would be a great branding opportunity for the program.

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Verge Ausberry, the interim athletic director, has a committee he put together to hire a football coach. I’m told their phones won’t stop ringing from very marketable candidates who’ll crawl to Baton Rouge just like Johnson did.

Landry’s media tour last week hasn’t put a crimp in any of that, contra the statements of the meltards and the media talking heads who ginned up a lot of the bogus narratives about how nobody wants to work for “Huey P. Landry.”

All of that was stupid, lazy talk. It’s embarrassing that so many people engaged in it.

Don’t be a meltard. It’s a bad look. And it won’t age well.

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